


War and Peace

by TiggyMalvern



Category: Gundam Wing
Genre: 1x2x1 old style, AU from endless waltz, Angst, Canon Compliant, Canon-Typical Violence, Do Not Repost to Other Sites, Jealousy, M/M, Mentions of PTSD, Pining, You Have Been Warned, follows the same tonal shift as the series, terrible communication skills, underage means teenagers having sex with each other, which makes them legal in any sane jurisdiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-01
Updated: 2021-01-17
Packaged: 2021-03-10 18:55:01
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Underage
Chapters: 7
Words: 38,433
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28471983
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TiggyMalvern/pseuds/TiggyMalvern
Summary: Duo Maxwell looks back on the war. And on Heero Yuy. Turns out he spends a lot of time thinking about Heero…
Relationships: Duo Maxwell/Heero Yuy
Comments: 30
Kudos: 34





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> I started this fic back in 2003, and abandoned it the same year when I got distracted by other fandoms. It sat in my WIP folder all those years, but whenever I went back and looked at what was in there, this was the fic I really wished that I'd finished. And then in 2020 I finally did! 
> 
> This is by far the most rambling, info-dumpy, monologue-y story I've ever written. Duo likes to talk and I never found a way to stop him. **Edit:** Now with added beta! Thanks so much to the wonderful Solo, for making time to do this even when RL was sucking her dry.
> 
> I'm not sure I should have tagged Relena as a character up there, because this is Duo POV and Duo spends almost no time with her in canon. But while she doesn't actually have a 'scene', she's vital to the plot and people talk about her and think about her a lot, so she feels like a character to me. Trowa and Wufei only get a few lines too.
> 
> I watched the Japanese version with subs. If there were changes in the Cartoon Network dub, I don’t know about them. Where I’ve incorporated direct lines of dialogue from the show here and there, I’ve gone with the translation in the subs on Hulu, because that’s the version I had easiest access to. Where there have been differences in spelling among the various subtitled versions over the years (Maganacs/Maguanacs), I went with the spelling in the Gundam Wing wiki.

I swear, from the start there were times I thought being in a confined space with Heero Yuy must’ve been some weird, fucked up punishment invented just for me.

Guess I don't have to go into a lot of detail here, huh? It’s easy enough to figure out how it was – him silent, obsessive, all rigid routine and discipline. And me, well – my reputation’s gotten kinda exaggerated, you know, but the general idea’s in there somewhere.

I spent the first half a day in that school figuring out for sure that the guy I’d dragged onto Howard’s ship wasn't 'Fuck! My leg hurts!' Heero, or even 'Fuck! My Gundam's screwed!' Heero. It was just the usual Heero with all his natural charm. Right about then I got to wondering just what the hell I was doing there.

It had been a bad couple of months, even by my standards. I’d been trained for years to fight for the colonies and kick the occupiers out of my home. Then with maybe twenty minutes’ notice, I was being ditched on earth, hardly any information and not much in the way of back-up, and told to just get on with it. That was part of precisely nobody's plan. And I had orders to kill anyone who saw a Gundam – ha ha, right? I mean, Gundams, sixteen metre tall things. Not exactly built with hiding in mind. ‘Cept maybe Deathscythe, but that's a personal quirk of mine, not a major design consideration. 

We were meant to be seen; we were meant to stand up and put the fear of their gods or whatevers into the whole damn world, and instead we ended up fighting a guerrilla war in the most instantly recognizable pieces of kit ever designed. Oh, yeah, and then we fucked that up in the biggest way and got duped into killing the wrong set of guys, handing OZ their shot to take control of earth.

I’m saying ‘we’ like it was always that way, but at first none of us even knew there was a ‘we’. They sent us to earth thinking we were alone, unique in all the world. And I can see why they did that – you can’t tell what you don’t know, right? But it was still a messed up choice, 'cos the first time any two of us met, it was always at the vicious ends of some kind of weaponry. It’s lucky the Gundams were so well armoured, and Heero damn near immune to blood loss. And that every last one of us was smart enough to figure things out real quick, but I guess that’s a part of why they picked us for the job.

Finding I wasn’t on my own after all, that there was another pilot like me, and then another… it was more than just the relief, it gave me some faint hope that maybe we could make it work, and I might actually still be alive same time next year.

So yeah, I pretty much knew what I was doing there. Why I’d tracked Wing when we took off from New Edwards base after our ultimate screw up. I was sticking with an untrustworthy, thieving bastard who didn’t talk so much ‘cos I was desperate enough to prefer it to being on my own again. 

Sounds pathetic, huh? G always said I had to learn to fight alone, to be more independent. He was full of shit, though. I can work alone. I can fight alone and I'm damn good at it. I just don't wanna live that way 24/7 when I can choose different.

And that's why I ended up sprawled across a bed in some overblown swank of a school, watching Heero do push-ups on the floor.

That part was my fault too, more or less – I'd talked him out of exercising in the gym. Hell, if I thought _my_ situation was lousy, Heero was completely screwed. He had to be about the world's worst undercover guy back then. It wasn't that he showed off exactly, he just never gave so much as one thought to how odd he came over to other people. And he was too damn easy to bait into acting like a jerk. 

Yeah, we had a conversation. More talking from me, more glaring from him, but there were actual words on both sides.

I was stretched out along my bed in that room we shared, while he sat cross-legged on the floor, tapping away on his keyboard, same as most nights. “So, uh, Heero, dunno if you’ve noticed, but you’re getting a lotta weird looks around this place.”

“Let them,” he said, his fingers still working the keys. 

“Well, yeah, not like we gotta worry too much ‘bout what a bunch of rich brats think,” I agreed, all bright and airy. “But I got to thinking, ‘cos some of these kids must have uncles or grandparents who’re dukes and generals or some shit, right? And they might be calling home talkin’ bout this new kid showed up who’s crazy strong, and how he broke one of those super-skinny fencing swords on the face mask of one of their asshole friends.”

“They won’t care.” He was still fixed on his screen, but there was a line now, right between his eyes. I hadn’t even been in the picture when he pulled that fencing stunt of his, but the gossip sure got around.

“Course not, not at first.” It made sense to me – why would a parent who’d bother to listen to their kids pack them off someplace they’d never see ‘em? “But enough of them say it and keep on saying it, and then those dukes and generals meet up at some fancy party and get to chatting ‘bout how their kids are in school together, and it all starts piling up.”

That’s when he actually took his eyes off of the laptop. “What are you suggesting?”

“I’m thinking if you’re planning on pushing anywhere near your limits, you might wanna keep it out of sight of the kiddies, maybe.” And yeah, it would’ve helped if he’d lightened up and acted more like some of those rich types breezing casually through the world, but I went with what I thought I could get.

I figured he agreed with me when he started exercising in the room. He sure as hell wasn't gonna say it to my face that he’d been wrong, not back then anyways.

So there he was, every damn day, an hour at least; a hell of a lot longer if he was mad or just plain bored. Push-ups, squats, sit-ups, even hanging from the doorframe doing pull-ups with his fingertips, plus a nice little routine in stretches to start and finish. And I got to lay across my bed and watch the whole show. Looked straight past the edges of my screen and watched the strands of dark wet hair that straggled unevenly across the back of his neck. Watched the sweat cling to the skin of his shoulder before trickling down along his flexing triceps. Watched the way his ass moved right beneath that tight spandex as he pistoned his legs. Oh, I got real familiar with Heero's rear view.

And that’s given the last of it away, I guess. There was more to my particular form of torture than just his personality. And, yeah, I was well aware that lusting after Heero Yuy wasn't the brightest thing I could do, but my dick had decided it was up for that, and the rest of me just had to tag along for the ride.

Adding the final, perfect touch to Duo Maxwell's private purgatory, there wasn't anywhere in that entire goddamn mansion where a guy could be sure of being able to jerk off in peace. And trust me, I looked.

The room would’ve been great if there was ever more than ten minutes when I was in it and he wasn't. We had the same classes, set times to eat, and he sure as hell wasn't gonna be doing any socializing. Never went near the library either. Yeah, a library – turns out those old-style places still have rooms full of actual paper books, but they’re more like a quiet place to go and work away from noise. Or annoying room-mates. Anyways, I figured he just didn't give a damn about the schoolwork or maybe he was some hot shit prodigy type who didn't need to try. I didn't care enough to find out. But when he didn’t absolutely have to be someplace else, he was in the room. Strike one.

The showers were promising at first glance – another classic jerk off site and the cubicles had doors, so they were private. But it was a single big room covered in tiles across the floor and right up to the high ceiling. The slightest noise echoed in there like a gunshot in a warehouse, and even over the running water it wasn't subtle. A couple of the lower intellectuals in the school were too stupid to figure it out, and hearing _that_ was enough to make sure I never tried it. The bathrooms had the same kind of problem – too many people in and out, all day long. You could jerk off quick and quiet at the most basic level, but you couldn’t have _fun_ doing it, and that’s a pretty big difference.

The grounds were a decent size, though it was all open sports fields with no real cover. Darkness makes for great cover, but that time of year the nights were on the cold side for outdoors to be so much of a viable proposition.

I went over every square metre of that school, found every cupboard and store room. Most of them were kept locked, which wouldn't have been a problem 'cept that picking them was a bit too obvious with so many people around. And I'm not just talking about the kids. One thing an expensive education seemed to buy was one hell of a lot of staff – teachers, cooks, cleaners, they prowled the corridors like goddamn prison guards. I even hacked the building plans, just to be sure I hadn't missed anything.

By the end of the week, I thought I was gonna fucking explode. I’d had more than enough of lying awake, trying not to wriggle and twist too obviously through my insomnia.

So that night I watched his exercise session with my usual attention to detail. Laying on my stomach, propped up on my elbows, hard-on pressed down deliciously into the mattress. Most nights it would have been torture, but today it was just adding an edge.

I had a plan.

My eyes glued themselves to his ass as he stretched, every part of that slow and so damn sexy warm-down routine. It didn’t change. I knew exactly what was coming next, already locked on target as he pulled his heel up to his butt, stretching out his quad, his back arching in and his ass pushing backwards, fractionally closer.

I shifted slightly on the bed, the move sending another pulse through my cock.

Last five easy lunges to the left and exercise was over for the night. He grabbed the towel from his bed and headed down the corridor to the showers. Count of twenty seconds, let him get out of earshot, and then I had something just under ten minutes before he’d be back.

Fifteen seconds with a power ‘driver and I had the door latch and lock disassembled. Traditional old building, old mechanical mechanisms, quick and easy. Electronics would have been a bitch. I took apart every single moving piece and oiled it thoroughly. And I’m not talking that oil-based, impurity-riddled crap that’s only fit for bicycle chains. I had a Gundam to keep up and running; I was kitted out with the latest in pure synthetics, the real high end mech lube. That stuff clings to metal in a barely-there monolayer – no giveaway drips or greasiness, and no nasty leftover residues to clean up, oh no. And guaranteed to make anything slide easy as an L2 whore, as the drunk Alliance bastards liked to say.

Just a little longer with the ‘driver to reassemble it all, and I was half way done. The hinges were trickier. I couldn’t take the damn things off to do the job properly – hanging a door isn’t a one-man job, ‘specially when you don’t reach one metre sixty – so I had to make do with trickling oil into each hinge from the top and waggling the door to try and make sure it worked its way through all the joints.

I stashed the ‘driver and the mech lube back in my cupboard and was stretched across my bed reading well over a minute before he got back.

He tapped away on his laptop for just over an hour, the usual routine. The sound drove me crazy – normally it was just background shit that I edited out, but that night the time was dragging. I slapped in my earphones to cut it out, but I wasn’t really listening to the music. I wanted to strangle him by the time he finally turned in. 

I listened until his breathing evened out and I figured he was asleep. Sure, he could’ve been faking it, but why would he bother? Waited another forty-five minutes, which puts most people well into stage four sleep, then slipped off of the bed and headed for the door. 

It opened completely silent – I'd done one hell of a good job in that short a time. The faint click as the latch engaged when I closed it was inevitable, but soft enough not to really bug me.

And then I hot-footed it down the hall to the bathroom, locked myself in, nearly broke the zipper on my pants, and wrapped my hand round my cock.

Okay, so as plans go it wasn’t exactly high class. I know creeping outta the room at night to jerk off in an empty bathroom seems pretty damn tragic, but I was fifteen and desperate.

I curled my fingers tighter and put that highly-trained recall of mine to good use.

I saw him laid out across the floor like he was earlier, damp with sweat as he straightened his arms in yet another push-up. Me stretching over him, leaning into him, burning cock pressed against that taut, flexing ass. Licking a long stripe through the salt across his shoulders, shoving that loose top down and sucking along the edges of muscles I’d been watching all week. Reaching around to feel his cock as hard as my own through the spandex, stroking up towards the head and finding dampness on the cloth.

And that was about as far as I got. 

Hey, I was a teenager and horny as hell. I thought I was doing good to last that long.

So I cleaned up fast, threw the tissues down the toilet and went back to the room, careful to keep that final click to the minimum as I closed and locked the door again. For the first time in days I got into bed feeling like I was actually ready to sleep, and I damn well needed it.

I made it further through the fantasy the next night.

*****

And now I guess I’ve gone and made myself sound totally sex-obsessed. Well, that’s fair, it’s pretty standard teenage boy territory, you know? But I did have other stuff on my mind too. Like planning the attack on the nearby OZ base.

I didn’t know exactly when Heero started working on destroying that base; he wouldn’t have involved me at all, if I’d left it to him. It was one of those things I found out by looking over his shoulder when he thought I was busy with my own shit. I only ever did that ‘cos I knew it annoyed the hell out of him. I’d had about enough by then of being ignored.

I already knew OZ had a place there, obviously, and once I knew he was on it too, I figured it couldn’t do any harm to make a few suggestions. The base was a standard enough layout, all the expected suit hangars and perimeter defences. “That place heavy on the Leos or the Aries?” I asked, from behind him.

“Both, but more Leos.” He didn’t look up from the screen, but at least he graced me with an answer.

I leaned in to peer closer. “Mark Twos or the Threes?” The Threes were a bit trickier, they had the upgrades to the weapons array.

Half-hanging over his shoulder like I was, I caught the way the muscle tightened in his cheek. “Not sure.”

“OZ are an organized bunch of bastards, huh?” As fast as they’d taken control of all those bases in their nasty little coup, they’d sealed up a few of the loopholes I’d been using to hack the Alliance secure systems, and I figured Heero was crashing up against that same wall. “So you plan for the Threes, and you’ll wanna take them out separate from the Aries.” The crossfire from both wouldn’t bring down a Gundam, but it might cause damage that would be annoying to repair, with no real facilities to do it.

“They’ll launch the Aries when they see me coming in.” Heero flicked through a couple more pages on the screen, scanning through the data.

“Then you draw them away a bit, take them out, and double back for the rest.” The thinking for a Gundam with flight capability was obvious to follow. “Easy enough, unless any of the old Specials troops are hanging out there. They’ll give you enough of a fight that there’ll be a hell of a lot more Leos active when you come in for the land assault.”

He finally looked away from the machine, angling his head up my way. “There are Specials,” he admitted.

“Hmmm.” The terrain around the base was empty, no civilians to worry about. “You’ll want some type of decoy, then,” I said. “You pre-plant explosives, pull some Leos away from the base, then come in from the other side for the Aries.”

“It would work,” he said. “It would add a lot to the mission time. Unless somebody else provided the decoy.”

Well, maybe he wasn’t just an irritating, stubborn thief with a hot body after all.

And from there, we were planning an attack by two Gundams, not one. It wasn’t like he specifically _asked_ me if I wanted in. Heero didn’t ask for favours from anybody that I knew of back then, definitely not from me. But I was in on all his research sessions after that without having to butt my way in, and everything was hinged on a two-pronged attack so we could take out the suit hangar and the air support simultaneously.

Those little chats of ours were real good for my fantasy life too. Gave me an excuse to look at him without coming over all stalker-ish, a chance to brush against the relaxed muscles of his arm as we peered at stats on a laptop screen. As far as I could figure, there wasn’t any part of Heero that didn’t look good from any angle, so I cheerfully added to my mental collection of jerk-off Heero material while we argued over how best to wreck ourselves some OZ bastards.

After a few more days, we’d hashed it out as far as we could with the info we’d gotten, and we’d allowed for most of the variables they might toss at us. Then it was a wait on the weather. 

We wanted a lousy night with low cloud cover; not many people around on the roads. Alliance were scum, and OZ were just the same old fuckers wearing a brand new name tag, but I really didn’t wanna be taking out some poor schmuck bystander who happened to see something they shouldn’t. Heero – well, I figured he thought it was too much hassle. He’d sure looked ready to shoot that kid Relena for recognizing him at the naval base that one time.

We only had to wait a couple of days once the planning was done – like I said, it was winter and too cold to whip your dick out. So that crappy weather came along pretty much on cue, and we headed down to the staff parking garage and took a look around. 

My eyes strayed onto a Cacciavale – six-fifty bhp in a lightweight carbon alloy shell, supposed to turn like a rat under a cat’s claws. Heero gave me one of those cold-eyed glares of his and said, “No.” Just like that, real flat.

“I know, I know, too much attention, I get it.” It wasn’t the sorta thing the local cops would expect to see a couple of teenagers driving, not even the rich kids from that school, but it didn’t hurt to wish, right?

I checked the tank on a souped-up GSA, understated design with enough power to get us out of most kinds of trouble, but when Heero looked over I had to shake my head. “Nearly dry.” We didn’t want to risk being caught on camera by stopping for hydrogen in the middle of the night.

We settled on a standard model sedan, which conveniently already needed a wash, and hoped we wouldn’t get into a chase situation. Getting in was easy. Prying off the dash panels and rearranging the connections took a bit longer. There are quicker ways to wire a car, but with luck nobody would know this one had ever been borrowed.

We left the school grounds real slow, no lights. It wasn’t like we expected anyone to be peering out their windows at oh-one-hundred, but it never hurts to play it safe. Well, not so often, anyways. 

The main gates were low-tech electronics, and Heero jumped out and had those open in under a minute. Schools never seem to be over-equipped with security, ‘specially not aimed at people breaking _out_. Onto the highway, lights on, and it was an easy, boring twenty minute drive to the forest where the Gundams were hidden. Tyres on wet road, water beating against the windscreen, those really big, heavy drops that fall off of the branches when the wind shakes them. Lots of noise and no conversation the whole way. I’d given up on trying to drag chit-chat out of Heero when he was in mission mode, and he stayed quiet ‘til after we parked up.

One bit of forest looks the same as another to me. I was a colony brat, not too much room for big trees out there. One or two in the parks, yeah, but not like this. It was dripping wet and dark, and I was sliding about on the soggy soil with just a flashlight to check the footing. I was real glad of the GPS, else I’d never have found the spot where I’d left Deathscythe. 

My hands were cold enough to shake by the time I got there and spotted the camo net covering him. I mean, I _knew_ he’d still be there. If he’d been found, it would’ve been all over the news. But in the last two years, I’d never been away from Deathscythe longer than a couple of days. Sounds weird, huh? But I’d been around while he was designed and built, training with only the one thing in mind; my whole life had revolved round that machine ever since I met Professor G.

I was so damn relieved to see him there waiting for me. That Gundam was the only thing on the whole stinking planet that was really mine. Leaving him was always a wrench, every time, but walking away that first time had been a total bitch.

Up in the cockpit, all the routine checks were good. Hey, they should have been – I hadn’t abandoned my Deathscythe without making sure he was set to go, and he was too good to deteriorate from standing a couple of weeks. I keyed in the pre-arranged communication channel. “Hey, Heero.”

“Yeah.” He was distracted, still completing checks, staring down at the console as gyros whirred.

“Ready to go?” Yeah, I knew he wasn’t. So?

He ignored me for another full minute before he looked up at the comm screen. “Ready,” he said finally. 

“See you there, then,” I said. I was grinning at the kick of being back where I belonged as I triggered ‘Scythe’s ECM, automatically cutting off comms. There wasn’t any more to say; we’d been over the plans so many times I’d been dreaming about that goddamn base.

I heard a familiar roar as Wing leaped into the air a hundred metres away, transforming as it rose above the trees, then disappearing into the cloud hanging low over the forest. Damn, but it looked good. I mean, Deathscythe was mine, and no way would I have swapped him for anything less than guaranteed independence for the colonies, but there were times in those early days when I wished he’d been designed to fly. Times like then, when I was left to creep my way through a pine forest. 

Creep, in a Gundam. Right. Sure, ‘Scythe had the visual stealth, but I could hardly cut a major trail of destruction through the trees, signed ‘Gundam went that way’. Not if we wanted to use that hiding place again, and, hey, it had worked so far. So I had to wriggle Deathscythe through trees not that much taller than he was most of the way to that OZ base. I’m not saying I didn’t break a few branches here and there, but given that soggy, slippery ground underfoot, I did a real tight job. 

The trees ended maybe a klick short of the base perimeter. I stuck close to the forest edge, well away from the floodlights, while I made my way round to the point nearest the main suit hangar. The ECM kept me off radar, but that wouldn’t help me any if a guy on guard duty was alert enough to spot a massive moving shadow. I was still a few minutes early, so I got to sit back and watch the place for any surprises.

It all looked like standard stuff. A few Leos patrolling the fence. Fixed missile launchers at intervals, probably set to auto-fire at anything big that didn’t put out the right signals. Well, yeah, that’d be me, then. Nothing looked odd that I could see, nothing any different from the Alliance bases we’d taken out no hassle. A bunch of slackers with no clue what was about to hit them.

Time to go. 

Straight for the fence at speed, Deathscythe covering that ground in a series of leaps. I switched off the ECM – no need for that in visual range. There were no problems from those missiles yet - friend-or-foe systems always took a second to kick in to avoid friendly fire incidents. Through the perimeter barriers with the scythe and into the base proper, and those patrolling Leos had barely even started to move. 

Yeah, there came the first of those missiles, EMF-tracking bastards. No slowing down, straight in past all the supply buildings and I sent the beam scythe right through the front of the main suit hangar. An explosion behind as one of those missiles missed me and took out their own storage building. Couldn’t dodge the second one, though – it hung on past all of those buildings and blew another damn big hole in the suit hangar beside me as the blast spread out from ‘Scythe’s shuddering torso. Convenient. A few seconds to get ‘Scythe rebalanced, then a bunch of my missiles went into the hangar point-blank to put one hell of a dent in OZ’s fun. The whole building erupted, flames shooting skyward as the roof collapsed. 

The Leos had started to pile in by then, heavy machine cannon fire bouncing harmlessly off of ‘Scythe’s armour. Leos looked real good being sliced clean through by a thousand degrees of thermal death, and if they bunched right two or three went down with a single swing. Oh yeah! There were no more of those bitch auto-missiles – someone must’ve hit the override once it was obvious Deathscythe beat them into the base. But the big question was, where the hell were the aerial units?

There. Some thirty seconds later than we’d planned for, sloppy bastards. They headed up at seven-o-clock, gaining height to stay beyond scythe range. Another Leo went down in front of Deathscythe, crunching underfoot as I leaped after the wiser guys who were hanging back and using long range beam fire.

Alarms screamed at me from the console, the heads-up showing those Aries swinging round for an attack run. And right on cue, there was Wing diving in behind them. That first beam-cannon sweep took out five before the stupid fucks even saw he was there. Feral cat in with the fat, lazy chickens, and I laughed as they scattered and fled, hopeless and desperate. Go, Yuy!

Deathscythe trembled with an extra-strong impact, damn noisy even over all the whining of beam fire. A dozen or more of the Leos back there were Threes, packing ramped-up bazookas, and more rounds were on the way in. ‘Scythe sidestepped the worst of them, and I headed round behind the comms tower for cover as I closed on them. My machine cannons scattered the suits as soon as I had line of sight back on them. A bunch headed towards the armory, and a couple of well-placed missiles saw it explode beautifully right as they passed it, the Leos disappearing into clouds of dust.

From there, it was all mopping up. We took out everything that moved, and we leveled the barracks and the officers’ quarters with missiles just in case. Heero finished off the last of those crippled Leos with the beam saber, slicing it vertically through in a second.

The flames from the suit hangar and the barracks lit the whole area with crazy, vivid flickers. Most of the base was smoking rubble. One or two buildings still stood, relatively untouched, but a lot of the ones we hadn’t targeted had been caught in the crossfire anyways. Mobile suit carcasses littered the deathscape, pieces of Aries glittering in the remains of the buildings they’d destroyed as they fell.

Damn, we’d done good. Barely ten minutes since Shinigami’s run for the fence and the place was nonexistent, while Deathscythe was still functioning at one hundred per cent. 

The comms bleeped, Heero’s face appearing on the screen, eyes hard. “Reinforcements sixteen minutes out. Time to go.” 

I grinned, bright and wide. “Next time, you get to play decoy. I don’t wanna hog all the fun.”

His expression didn’t change. “Be back at the car in sixty minutes.” Another bleep as he killed the link, and then Wing was rising up and swinging west.

“Anything you say,” I muttered, as I thought about the crawl back through the trees while OZ buzzed the area. I switched the ECM back on and headed for the forest edge, the autocleans lifting the raindrops and the last of the debris from the screens.

As it turned out, the trip back was more-or-less hassle free. There were a couple of points when the trees thinned out and I had to wait for the search planes to push off somewhere else before I could keep moving, but I made it back to my hidey-hole just fine.

I swung down from the cockpit to land with a squelch in the leaf litter and pine cones. The forest was silent, but for the dripping water and the far-away drone of OZ planes. Wing would’ve landed twenty minutes ago. Deathscythe had taken some minor damage, and there was routine maintenance and re-fueling to do, would be for Wing too, but we just had to stash them for now and leave that for another night – it was already close to four, and we still had to get the car back into the garage and fix the wiring. 

It took a while to get ‘Scythe hidden again so I was happy with him. It was still dumping rain on me the whole time, and we met up back at the car when we were done. 

I looked over at Heero, standing there in the headlights at the edge of the trees. He was splattered with mud right up past his knees, the pants he’d pulled on clinging to his thighs as tight as the damn shorts underneath, and water running from his hair. I looked at him and I thought how I must look, and I thought about all the devastation this pair of sodden rats had just caused and I busted out laughing. I was scrubbing away at the water dripping from the tip of my nose and baying like a lunatic.

Heero stared for a couple of seconds, and then his stoic face cracked right open and he was laughing too. Bent right over at the waist, hands on his thighs and howling with every bit of breath he had. 

It wasn’t a very nice sound, not from either of us; probably kinda sick too, laughing over everything we’d just done. 

But damn, I felt good.

*****

The lousy weather held the next two nights, so I got to catch up on some sleep. But the night after that, we were back at the Gundams, freezing cold and trying to patch together repairs and do a weapons overhaul by moonlight. I could do it – could’ve done it by candlelight if I’d had to – but I can’t say I liked it. Howard’s ship was a luxury complex when the alternative was a misty forest. Pity he was on the other side of the planet.

Outside of that, the routine at the school went on exactly as it had before, minus the battle strat sessions. I found I kinda missed those – I’d gotten used to having his attention on me, not to mention my fixation with staring at him. Now he was back to mostly ignoring me, while I watched his body every chance I got without being a brazen creep. And I jerked off in an empty bathroom every night. 

It would’ve been more fun if Heero had been better invested in conversation instead of me making all the running, but it wasn’t a bad deal we had going, and I could’ve stayed and investigated some other local OZ outlets. Heero had plans on the go, though, and it was less than a week after the attack that he made his announcement when he came back from his shower.

"I'm erasing the records tomorrow and leaving."

I mulled over his words, trying to figure out what he was actually saying. He'd said 'the records', not 'my records'. Did that include mine? Was this his way of asking if I was coming too? 

Screw it. If it wasn't intended as an invitation, I was damn sure he'd let me know.

"About time," I said, totally casual. "So where are we going?"

"Frankfurt." 

He didn't sound pissed at my assumption. He didn't sound pleased either, but I figured neutral was as good as I was gonna get. "Target?"

"Unknown. More information when we get there."

I had Howard out there, and Heero obviously had somebody too. I didn’t need details – it was gonna be best not to know. "Okay."

Two days later, our names were on the rolls of yet another classy boarding school some fifty klicks from a mobile suit factory. I'll say this for Heero; he didn't slum unless he had to. Me, I would’ve hung out at the local sink school where no-one would give a damn if you only showed up in class half the time, if that, but I guess Heero would’ve stuck out even worse there. People make allowances for rich weirdos. Poor ones get the walking target treatment. 

I didn't bother checking this new place out the same way. I mean, I did; I knew the layout to the metre in under thirty hours, just in case I ever needed it. But I wasn't one to break a tried and tested method without good reason, and my nocturnal jaunts to the bathroom had been working out just fine. So I oiled up the door that first day, and slipped into the same routine.

I don’t remember now whether it was the fourth or fifth night when he blasted my complacency to fucking sub-atomic particles.

I went back to the room, releasing the handle super slow. Closing the door that way was already a habit. I’d caught myself doing it during the day a few times, which must’ve looked kinda odd. I padded barefoot across the thick, slightly worn carpet, listening to soft, even Heero-breathing. I was convinced he was asleep so it was one hell of a shock when he spoke up.

"You don't have to leave the room."

_Shit._

I knew he wouldn't have missed that reaction, and covered it in hope anyway. "You'd prefer I pissed in the cupboard?" I asked airily as I bounced back onto my bed.

Silence. 

Good. Silence was good right about now. 

I dragged the sheets back over myself, wondering just how many nights he’d been awake before he finally decided to say something. 

I lay in the dark, knowing that the great Heero Yuy was across the room thinking how Duo Maxwell was so tragically horny he couldn't sleep without jerking off. Not likely to earn me any more points with Mr Discipline, but then I was past the point of expecting anything would. He respected Shinigami well enough by then, else I wouldn't still be around, but he didn’t have much time for me.

You think that sounds fucked up, huh? I'm not exactly Shinigami. He's some guy who shares a bit of brain space with me. With Shinigami doing all the killing, the rest of the time I could keep right on just being Duo. Sure, there'd be dozens of shrinks lining up to tell me that’s not healthy, but every time I looked at Heero I figured my way was the better deal.

"It's not as if I don't do it too."

_What?!_

I couldn't help wondering just when he'd made the time. Hell, I thought _I'd_ been pretty secretive. Heero must've jacked off in about two minutes flat if he'd found any opportunity in the last few weeks. Unless he did it in Wing, and even I wasn't that desperate. But, hey, that was an image I could get along with – Heero strapped down in his cockpit, legs spread wide and hand down his shorts.

So with my mind going that tangent, it was damn near a minute before I figured out he'd just admitted he was human. 

No, not 'cos he jerked himself off – I mean, I hadn't given it too many specific thoughts, but he was a guy and it's pretty much just assumed. He was human ‘cos he knew I was laying there stewing and he said something he'd no reason to say 'cept to make me feel a bit less shitty about myself.

I'd been waiting ever since I met the bastard for some expression of thanks, a little casual conversation, anything to tell me he gave the slightest thought to me being there beyond when Deathscythe might come in useful on a mission. And when I finally got it, I couldn't even acknowledge it. I mean, what the hell was I supposed to say to that? 'Thanks' didn't exactly fit the bill. Guys just don't talk about that shit. Not when they're sober for sure.

But I couldn't just ignore it, the one and only time he actually made an effort to be _nice_. So I gave him one of those non-committal grunts he used so often on me and figured he'd know what it meant.

And, yeah, that tiny gesture of his worked. I did feel better about myself and I slept just fine.


	2. Chapter 2

The next day left me with one hell of a dilemma. The real big kind that had me distracted for most of the day. 

Just what the hell was I gonna do that night?

I chewed over that one through most of my classes and got nowhere. Did get me some odd looks from Heero, though – guess it didn't take a Yuy level of observational skills to see I wasn't much invested in trig.

I couldn't go on sneaking out, not after he'd called me on it – that would be just too pathetic. I mean, it _was_ pathetic, jerking off in the bathroom every night over fantasies of my roommate, but to make like last night never happened and carry on would be a level of pitiful I couldn't descend to.

Doing what he said and fucking my hand in my own bed like any normal guy – with him lying right across the room and me hissing under my breath and trying not to pant too hard – that wasn't an option, any more than it had been before. It gave me some hot fantasies, though, where I did just that and Heero came over and blew me instead. Wet mouth on my hard cock, one hand clutching tight at my ass, the other stroking wicked fingers across my balls.

Did I mention I wasn't paying attention in math?

No matter which way I turned it over, there wasn't a good answer. I twisted it around all damn day, looking for the thing that I'd missed, anything to get me away from the only obvious way out.

Abstinence. I was gonna have go back to lying awake and willing away my hard-on by thinking about camels in tutus and trying not to hear him breathe.

Thanks a fucking bunch, Yuy.

I watched him exercise same as usual that night. Knew I’d pay for it with a killer hard-on, but he just looked too damn good not to. I was weak that way. Me and every other male teenager on the planet.

He finally went for his shower and I shoved my nose into my geography for real. Maybe if I made an effort to concentrate, instead of wondering how Heero looked in the shower along the hall, my cock might calm down. It was social geography, the real dull kind, so I figured I was in with a chance at least. Though the rain hammering against the window wasn’t helping with the shower side of things.

Less than a chapter later and I was distracted all right, but it wasn’t the influences of changing industry on population movements that was doing it. There was a feeling in the back of my head, driving me absolutely crazy. Not that something was _wrong_ wrong, not the serious klaxons, just something was different.

I checked the clock. Twenty minutes. He’d been gone nearly twenty minutes.

He never took longer than ten.

Shit.

I grabbed the pistol from under my mattress – there were reasons I was always laying on the bed and never working at the desk – and crept over to the door, listening hard. A few footsteps in the corridor, kids chatting and giggling. Nothing out of the ordinary. 

I switched off the lights and checked from the window – darkened sports fields, no sign of movement. I carefully opened it up, letting in a blast of freezing air. Yep, cold at night in Frankfurt too. It was a still night, the kind when sound should carry for miles, and all I could hear was the usual traffic noise from the highway beyond the grounds.

I holstered my pistol under my shirt, stuffed on socks and shoes and swung myself out onto the window ledge. Reached across for the drainpipe – it felt a lot further now than it’d looked in daylight – and shimmied on down. At least the rain had stopped, but the pipe was still wet and slippery as hell, and I slithered the last ten feet in a half-controlled fall, landing with a muffled squelch. Grass was good – concrete would have made a nasty, obvious thud.

I waited in the shadow of the school a few minutes for my eyes to adjust. It wasn’t close to enough, but I figured I might not have thirty minutes to stand around getting real night vision. There was some light escaping from the rooms past the drapes, that helped. 

I crept round the perimeter of the building, and I was shivering by the time I finished the circuit. Yeah, I could’ve worn a coat, but it restricts movement and gun access. I wasn’t that keen to stay warm that I’d die for it. I still hadn’t seen a damn thing that shouldn’t be there – no sign of any OZ. If they were here, they were being real quiet about it.

I wasn’t sure enough to just walk in the door yet, though, so I made my way back round to the west quad and in through a cleaning store window. Picked the lock in under twenty seconds – well, it wasn’t exactly high security – and cracked open the door while my eyes adjusted to the corridor lights. 

Nobody there, so I wandered out and made my way back to our section of the school. Didn’t see too many kids, smiled and chatted with the ones who passed me, making sure they looked at my face, not my muddy shoes, and checking out each corner a bit more carefully as I got closer to the room. 

There was no-one in the showers, but a few of them had been recently used. I was real glad nobody saw me peering past the half-closed doors of the cubicles and groping at the walls to check for warmth. 

No sign of violence anywhere. If Heero had been dragged off someplace he didn’t wanna go, I figured there’d be _something_. 

Our room was empty, and freezing cold when I got back, so I closed the window first thing. By that time, I was pretty convinced Heero had just wandered off; it wasn’t like I could expect him to tell me all his shit, was it? But I was still way too wired to be able to just kick back and relax, or even get any of that pointless schoolwork done. Paranoia gets you that way. And, yeah, I know they say it’s not paranoia if they really are out to get you, but I was thinking I’d probably just pushed the limits on that one.

I looked my gun over, cleaned away the damp from the outside. No moisture in the mechanism; you’d have to drop it in a lake for a couple of days for that, but I checked anyway. I reassembled it and shoved it under my mattress.

The door opened and I nearly leaped out of my fucking skin. I whipped round and yeah, it was Heero. Damn, I wished he wouldn’t wear those flexi-soled shoes that didn’t make a sound when he walked. I wore them too, course I did, but I’d never seen _him_ have a spook out when I walked up behind him and it happened to me every couple of days. 

At first, anyways – I realized then it’d been over a week since I’d felt like he was creeping up on me.

“Heero, wh–” Well, fuck, I was gonna sound like his mom. “What did you make of the EMF question?”

His eyes trailed all the way down to my wet shoes and mud-splattered pants. He didn’t say anything, he just stared at me.

“Felt like a walk,” I shrugged. “Figured it might help with the physics. You know how sometimes the more you think about something, the more it all gets tangled up in your head, and if you just empty your brain for a while then it kinda pops up all finished on its own? You ever get that?”

He didn’t answer that either, but I wasn’t expecting him to.

“Ah, well, it didn’t work this time anyways.” I peeled off my shoes and cold, clammy socks; socks in the laundry basket, shoes under the bed. 

“I went to the library after I showered. I’ll probably do the same tomorrow.” He turned his back on me and opened up his laptop.

And that’s when I figured out what he’d done. He’d taken himself off outta the way so’s I could jerk off in peace. He just hadn’t bothered to tell me about it.

I could’ve fucking killed him.

I could’ve grabbed him and kissed him and humped him through the floor.

Neither of those feelings were exactly new. But I wasn’t gonna stand there gaping at his back like an idiot, so I made damn sure my grin was obvious in my voice. “Schoolwork finally getting to you, huh? I was beginning to wonder if you were some kind of natural genius or something.”

I didn’t need to see his reaction, I could imagine the look his laptop was getting well enough. That brightened my mood just fine as I stripped off the rest of my clothes.

It wasn’t ‘til after I got into bed that I realized I had no hint of a hard-on. Absolutely nothing going on down there at all. So that was the other solution I’d been looking for – I just had to freak myself out and embarrass myself every night and hey, problem solved.

Great.

*****

It was kinda awkward, laying there touching myself when he was sitting in the library knowing what I was doing. Not awkward enough to stop me, mind – I mean, even if I didn’t do it, he’d still be thinking I did, right? So nothing to lose there then.

And it wasn’t like he knew _exactly_ what I was doing. He didn’t know I was horny for him, didn’t know I was fantasizing about him. Hey, if I’d caught anybody drooling over me that way, I’d have teased them into such a pit of embarrassment they’d never have risked their eyeballs on me again, and I couldn’t see Heero letting it slide either. 

Well, I’d have embarrassed ‘em if I wasn’t interested. If I was interested, there’d have been less looking and more fucking by now.

So, yeah, I figured there was no way Heero knew, and so it couldn’t hurt, right? And maybe that made me a hypocrite but I never laid claim on being anybody’s saint.

I thought about the way that tank top clung to him, damp and dark with sweat when he stretched out, folding flat over his own leg. Thought about the muscles bunching up along his arms, taut and tense when he did his pull-ups. I remembered the flex of the lines along his thighs when he did those one-legged pistol squats. And I pictured myself putting my hands all over every millimetre of his skin, peeling back the stretch of the lycra to get him bare. I definitely pictured my hands roaming all over his ass, that tight rear view of his I’d gotten so familiar with over the last few weeks. 

I imagined him pressing up against me, ‘cos the Heero inside of my head _wanted_ me touching him – and yeah, I was really pushing the limits of my inventiveness for that part, but I managed. I imagined us rubbing on one another and groping every bit of each other, those callused mechanic’s palms dragging over my neck and my spine, and his thumbs curling into my hair to keep us close. I imagined leaning in and kissing him, how we’d both open up and I’d get my tongue inside his mouth and…

Yeah, I thought about kissing him. Any kind of real contact had been lacking since I’d gotten dumped on earth, and Gundam pilots are human too, you know? Or at least this one was. Guess I shouldn’t claim to speak for Heero.

I’d throw my arm over his shoulder sometimes when we strolled between classes, just for a chance to touch somebody. The other kids gave us some weird looks – friendly, chatty Duo hanging all over Mr Morose – but they thought everything about Heero was odd, so it’s not like I was making anything any worse. 

Come to think of it, Heero never did shove me away. Maybe even he had to admit he was human too. 

So I thought about him, and I thought about everything I knew to think of. What I did to myself through all of it – well that part’s obvious enough. Everybody does it pretty much the same, I figure.

And when I was done, it was just me, lying on another temporary bed with my hand covered in come. But it was definitely fun, before the fantasy skidded to a halt against the stoppers.

I made sure to clean up well after; tissues first, that I took and dumped in the trash can in the bathroom then he wouldn’t have to look at them when he came back. Washed myself off so’s I didn’t stink and straightened the worst of the bedsheets out. He’d still know, but he was making the effort to be nice about it, so I could do the same and not be up-in-his-face obvious.

He didn’t get back to the room for another thirty-five minutes that first night. The next day I took it slower.

*****

We’d only been in Frankfurt a week when another new arrival showed up there – the same dumb kid Heero had been edging to shoot in that naval base, back when I met him. Relena somebody – that one.

Then I realized I’d maybe seen her in the other school, the day we left. I hadn’t really looked too close, since we were bailing anyways.

The base had been in Asia. What the fuck was she doing in Europe now, and in all the same places as us?

I hooked my arm round Heero’s after morning classes and chatted and smiled with everyone we passed while I steered him down the hallways to the room.

The second the door was shut, I hit him with it. “What’s the deal with this Relena kid? What’s she doing here?”

He leaned himself back against the door frame, arms crossed, all fake-casual. “How would I know?”

“Well, you knew her before, and she knows you.”

“You’re the one who stopped me killing her.”

Okay, there was that. And he’d never actually given me any hassle over how I shot him, when I definitely would’ve been bringing it up any time he pissed me off, so I had to credit him for letting it go.

Not that he’d answered the question, and he wasn’t quite looking me in the eye – he wasn’t glaring me down the way he should’ve been with _that_ statement.

I tipped my head as I studied him. “How much _does_ she know?”

A hesitation, a few seconds left hanging, and I already knew I wasn’t gonna like the answer. “She saw Wing,” he admitted.

Well, fuck. “Before the base?” We’d only been on earth three days, how could he have screwed up that hard that fast?

“After.”

That made it seriously weird. If he’d run into her again, how the hell was she still alive? “You didn’t kill her?”

Another one of those breath-long pauses while he studied someplace on the wall behind me. “I came close a couple of times.” And that was Heero Yuy standing there, shuffling against the door frame and looking almost _sheepish_ about it. Like he felt he fucked up by not wanting to blast some luckless kid through the head.

I kinda had to sympathize with him there, and I flopped myself down onto the bed. “How d’you know she’s not gonna rat you out?”

He just shrugged. “She hasn’t so far.”

I’d been hoping for something a bit more solid in the foundations than that. Nothing about her looked like she’d been trained to stand up to interrogation, if OZ ever shifted their eyes over her way.

But Heero had thought about killing her more than once, and she was still out there, sitting all chirpy and shiny-haired in the rec room.

I got to wondering then if maybe he was into her. She was pretty enough, if you went that way. 

He didn’t _act_ like he liked her. He treated her the same as he treated every other kid in the place, like he wished they’d drop dead face down in a pan of used engine oil. But for whatever reason of his own, he broke against orders and gave the kid a pass.

After I’d gotten over the shock of _that_ , I didn’t mind, honestly. Murdering civvies was never my thing; that’s why I’d stopped him that first day. And Heero – well, I was slowly building up a list of details that said Heero wasn’t so much of an asshole as he made himself out to be, and I found I liked knowing that.

I wasn’t sure _I_ was giving Relena a pass ‘til I’d dug around a bit more, though, so I started doing some asking. I always made nice with everybody I happened by, not just in those schools – if you wanna hope you’ll get tipped off early to anything new or weird going on, you gotta have people around who like you – and they were thrilled to supply me with the gossip.

Turned out her dad was that government bigwig who’d gotten blown away in the colonies right before New Edwards. S’posedly it was colony separatists; most likely it was down to OZ. That might give her a reason to move somewhere new, and a damn good reason not to be any sorta friend to the murdering bastards in charge, if she’d figured out the second part.

There was nothing weird about her pattern of calls when I hacked the school’s logs, and she acted pretty much the same as all the rest of those rich kids. She went to classes, she turned in her reports on time, she sat in groups with the other girls and whispered and giggled. And if sometimes she sat on her own all quiet and thoughtful, well, she’d just lost her dad; that would likely fit.

She watched Heero a lot, I couldn’t help noticing, but that hardly made her a spy – I mean, I watched him a lot too, though I’m pretty sure I was less obvious about it than she was. Course it helped that I had excuses to look, since he actually hung out with me instead of always keeping more than half the room between us.

A few days in, I tagged her as weird but harmless, and after that I kept just enough of a track on where she was at to be sure nobody was tying her down and ripping out her fingernails.

*****

By that time, I was well into my new evening routine. The one that didn’t leave me creeping around like a horny cat burglar, and left plenty of time to really let my mind go roaming through all those visuals I’d been hoarding.

I wasn’t rushing into anything at that point. I’d sprawl across my bed and stroke myself through my clothes instead of just whipping it out. Tease myself a bit, let it start to build, nice and easy. Imagine it was his hand on me, not my own.

I’d taken it outside of this bland shared room in my head too. I imagined how it might’ve gone if I’d hit on him back on Howard’s ship, laying on the deck under that weirdly pretty moon, both of us smelling of ocean and salt with the breeze on our skin as we stripped each other bare. I played it through in the forest after the mission, when we’d hidden the Gundams and we were still all ramped up on adrenaline. Had us pressed up against each other among the trees (it wasn’t winter and it wasn’t raining, I’d tweaked a few details there), rubbing up against each other’s thighs and – 

And then I heard the so-soft click of the key in the door and Heero walked in. 

I was laying there with my pants peaked up over a big, obvious stiffie, and my hand hovering somewhere in mid-air, stuck between wanting to cover my groin and pretending I’d never been anywhere near it.

“Uh, Heero, you know if you wanted to watch, you could’ve just asked.” I didn’t think it was a bad effort, though I doubt I fully pulled off the grin. I was flaming red as a nuclear sunset, and _that_ wasn’t something I was gonna be able to cover for.

There was nothing fazed or embarrassed about Heero, not that I could see. He just looked right at me, all matter-of-fact, and said, “I could do that for you.”

I don’t often find myself missing something to say, and it’s Heero who does it to me every time. I almost asked him if he meant what I thought he did, but I knew there was nothing wrong with my goddamn ears. And he was looking at me real intense in a way that was hotter than hell. So I just kept my mouth shut so’s not to look any sillier than I already did.

“It might be better for you if I did it. Probably better for me if you did.” He walked closer while he talked, watching my face the whole time. I think I’d have had a heart attack for real if he’d been looking any lower.

He put his fingers on my chest, and then I moved for the first time since he’d walked in.

Well, I wasn’t gonna say no, was I?

It wasn’t a surprise that Heero had more guts than I did. I guess that kinda goes with the territory when you go through the days genuinely not worrying too hard ‘bout whether you live or you die. But once he’d made that first move, I wasn’t gonna let him get away with directing everything, no way.

He hadn’t been in the shower. I figured he’d spent the whole time waiting outside the door and listening, waiting to time his entrance just right. Catch me when I was obvious enough to give him his opening, but not totally, well, in flagrante, ‘cos walking in on that might’ve been pushing the boundaries a bit too far. That’s the way I’d have done it, if I’d been planning to jump him. If I’d ever thought for one second that Heero would react to a proposition with anything different from total disdain.

It kinda surprised me that my brain was still working when I had my hands on him and his on me, but then I’d gone off the boil a bit there. Serious embarrassment will do that to you, even with Heero Yuy looking at you that way. But he was still damp and salty from the exercise, and that fitted in well with all those fantasies I’d been having, so I warmed up again real quick.

It wasn’t great sex. It wasn’t even sex, really, by most definitions – more of a mutual groping with a bit of licking and rubbing. It was clumsy and uncoordinated, with both of us trying to set a rhythm and not matching up. Not exactly surprising. I was going off of stuff I’d read and watched here and there, alongside some drunken boasting from Howard’s crew, with a few quick feels thrown in. G had kept me pretty busy the last three years, and before that I was too young to be taking an interest. Hell knew where Heero’s information might’ve come from, but I was guessing there wasn’t much practical training on his end either.

Neither of us lasted long enough to make much of a deal out of anything, and then he turned right around and went back to his own bed. He didn’t say anything more, and I was still hovering somewhere between post-orgasmic and half-asleep. But it was one hell of a step up from humping my own hand, and I wasn’t planning for it be a one-off.

*****

There wasn’t anything awkward about the next day. It was just the next day, and no different from all the ones before it. We went to classes, we tossed around plans for the attack on the mobile suit factory. What we’d done at night was irrelevant to what we had to do for a mission, and I sure as hell had no intention of doing anything stupid that might convince him not to touch me again.

I wanted it way too badly.

There was only the one moment that was kinda unsure, that night when he came back after his shower and I looked at him and he looked at me; then he just nodded, so I went over to his bed and put my hand on his crotch. No style, I admit, but neither of us were the type to hold back once we’d made a run at something.

From there, it was so damn easy. We managed to be a lot more coordinated for round two, and we both liked the results of that. Within days we were trying out other stuff, and the first time Heero gave me a blow job, it was the best orgasm I’d ever had by about a hundred light years. I wasn’t so sure about sucking cock myself – it tasted odd for real, and it was clumsy and I drooled too much – but it was okay, not actively repulsive, and fair’s fair, right?

But nothing we did even came close to when we really got adventurous.

It wasn’t like we planned it, any more than we planned anything else outside of a Gundam attack. Well, I guess I can only talk for me on that one. Maybe Heero planned some of it; it wasn’t like we ever talked about what we did. But if he did, he wasn’t pushing too hard. 

We were sixty-nine-ing – after a bit of experimentation, that ended up being our usual position. It got us both off in the best way in the quickest time. Efficient. And I’d kinda gotten used to the taste. So I had his cock in my mouth, one hand on his balls and the other holding his ass.

He had a great ass – I mean really. All tight, shaped muscle and incredibly soft skin. I’d been admiring it a long time before I got my hands on it, and it didn’t disappoint. I devoted a fair bit of my free time to thinking about that ass. And while I was groping him that night, I got to wondering about some of those other things Howard’s guys had joked about.

I stopped sucking for a moment. “Hey, Heero, mind if I try something?”

“Go ahead.” He took his mouth off my cock just long enough to answer, then went right back to work. He didn’t even ask what. Well, I guess he’d liked everything I’d done so far, huh?

I stuck my finger in my mouth alongside his cock to get it wet, then stroked the tip around and over his ass.

I’d done this to myself a few times. It was fun, but it wasn’t the easiest thing to do for getting off. I was flexible enough to reach no problem, but the closer I got to coming, the more hassle it was. I’d taught myself to shoot a gun with both hands just fine, but trying to keep both hands coordinated in two different ways when I jerked myself off was more effort than it was worth in the end. Besides, like I’d found out with Heero, nothing’s quite as good when you’re doing it to yourself. Too predictable. Just like you can’t tickle yourself, I guess.

He stopped sucking when he felt my finger, and while that was definitely a bad thing for me, I didn’t know if that made it a bad thing for him. He didn’t say anything, though, and I figured he’d let me know fast enough if he wasn’t on board. I slid my finger in a bit and felt around, thinking how it was a good thing people who spent a lot of time working on mechs kept their fingernails short. He went right back to sucking on my cock then, which was a _very_ good thing.

I didn’t know how this felt for him but it felt strange as hell to me. I mean, I had my finger up someone’s _ass_. Tight muscle round the knuckle of my finger and then all hot and weirdly stretchy inside. Pretty much all my attention was on my finger, and I was kinda surprised to find I was still sweeping my tongue around his cock. Guess it had become a reflex by then. I felt a pulse beating hard against my finger, and that weirded me out for a minute there. Hey, that’s one place they don’t tell you to check in first aid class, huh?

I’d done a lot of shit a lot of people would call weird, though, and I never hung back on any of it. I knew what I’d found in me, I just had to feel around a bit ‘til I found it in him.

It was obvious enough when I got there – he went push-up tense through every muscle for maybe three whole seconds, like he was thinking about it, before he softened right down again. 

I read that as my cue for more of the same, and I kept on doing exactly what I just did, sucking my cheeks in tight over the head of his cock and stroking around in there, and his breathing got heavier and raspier as we went on and his body was in that place that’s half way relaxed and half way reaching, and then his mouth was gone and my cock was hanging down in empty air.

I quit everything I was doing too and looked up between us and he stared at me with irises like lasers. “Try more.”

I hadn’t been expecting _that_ from him, but it was obvious enough what he meant. “Uh, Heero, you know I don’t have, I mean we kinda need…” See what I mean when I say guys can’t talk about this stuff? Not even when they’re actually _doing_ it.

He untangled himself from me, which was something of a disappointment, while he groped around under the bed. And damned if he didn’t come out with - mech lube??

“It’s safe,” he said. “Non-irritant, no impurities.”

“What??”

He shrugged. “I did some reading. It seemed sensible.”

Well, yeah, okay, maybe it was, but I was still dubious. “You sure about that? I mean, there’s a lot of shit out there if you’re not reading in the right places.”

He just gave me a look.

“Okay, okay, I’ll buy it if you do.” Hey, if it was good enough for Deathscythe, right? Well, no, not hardly, but suddenly I was there on a bed with serious, _thinking_ Heero Yuy and I wanted him to get back to sucking my cock, so what the hell. 

And yeah, I’d been around him long enough by then to know he was really goddamn smart, and not just in the academy of mass destruction, so I figured he’d know what he’d read. I grabbed the tube from him and got right back to where I’d been; him flat on his back and me half-kneeling over him, and both of us with a mouthful of each other. And then I squirted out some lube and wriggled my finger back where it’d been too. 

Having mech lube on my fingers was normal enough – I’d spilled enough of it when I was younger, I’d gotten it in most places, if never up anybody’s ass – but the heat and softness past the slick of it was a big change from unyielding Gundanium. The easy slide of it was real familiar, though, and he relaxed around me pretty much instantly the second time. He was breathing slow and all the way deep, the flow of air from his nose cool on my damp skin where he was sucking on me, and it wasn’t a big deal to get another finger in.

Well, it wasn’t so big a deal for me. It sure as hell seemed to be for him. 

His hands curled tight into the bedcovers either side of my face, and he shivered all along the length of him. I called a halt again, and then his hips pressed up, so oh, okay, it seemed to be a _good_ big deal, not a bad one.

He’d stopped sucking on me, his head tipped back loose onto the bed, and I thought about complaining, but I was just too damn curious watching the effect my fingers were having on him to get mad about it. And the angle was bad in so many ways, how my wrist was twisted round to get in there, and me trying to squint up between us and past his cock to look at him, so I switched to kneeling between his thighs, and that worked out better. Better angle for fine motor control of my hand, and the light was spread right across his face so’s I could lick all round the tip of him and still see just how his eyelashes twitched over his skin. 

He was panting, and I could _hear_ him breathe, and that took me right back to those visions of exercising Heero I’d been living with for weeks. Only now I had my hand on his thigh, on all those muscles, holding him while I sucked on him. And his lips were open and slack and still wet from being wrapped round my cock, and when he was actually doing that I wasn’t ever thinking ‘bout much of anything, but I was thinking about it now, and wow, I mean, he actually _did_ that, and fuck, that was hot, ‘cos he looked fantastic. And he always looked fantastic, hey, it was one of the first things I noticed, right after noticing he had a semi-auto pistol aimed at some dumb kid, but he looked even better when he dropped the attitude and just relaxed.

And relaxed wouldn’t be the word for him then, with his lungs heaving and his hips curling up onto my fingers and his cock head full and salty on my tongue, but he was way further out of it than I’d ever seen him, and I did that, and I was gonna do it more. 

Not right then, though, ‘cos that’s when he came, and I always got distracted by the whole suddenly having to swallow part. 

He was a lazy sprawl across the messed up bedcovers, all hair and eyelashes and soft lips, and a hint of tongue behind his teeth. Not one line of tension in any muscle anywhere, just the lift and fall of his ribs as he breathed.

I’d never gotten to study him like that – he was always watching me watching and making me feel weird about it – but he lay there for maybe a full minute before he moved. And then he snapped right back and flipped himself around, up onto his hands and knees. 

He looked at me over his shoulder, eyes darker than I’d ever seen them. “Do you want to try it?”

Anything that made goddamn Heero Yuy space out like that _had_ to be good. I grinned at him, wide and toothy. “Hell, yeah.”

*****

It’s probably a fucked up thing to say, but my life was actually fun around then.

We took out that factory near Frankfurt, then moved on to an even swisher school in Vienna. We flattened an OZ base at Vienna, and then hauled ass to Geneva. We hacked whatever money we needed from the system and wiped every official trace of our existence when we left. 

The targets were never even close to a problem for the two of us together, and it turned into something of a competition – who took out the most suits, which of us actually flattened the main objective. We weren’t keeping score exactly, but it wasn’t far off, at least for me. 

A few missions in, I knew how he fought, and he knew how I fought, and we could figure out each other’s moves. If a plan had to change midway, we’d work around each other and rely on the back-up being where we expected, and we didn’t need to waste time chatting about it first. It just felt good. 

We got no shit from the Alliance stragglers or from OZ; they had no clue who we were or where we hid out. The whole war gig was like one big game.

The sex was a game as well, if one hell of a good one. A game that kept on ramping up by the day. I mean, ‘curious’ and ‘adventurous’ were hard baseline qualifications for a Gundam pilot, and we were never just gonna stop where we were at – we tried out most things either of us had heard of to try, and finding a couple of things that weren’t for us didn’t hold us back from playing around some more.

We were fucking our brains out every night, when we weren’t piloting giant mobile suits and blowing shit up. Pretty much every teenager’s hottest dream, huh? And, yeah, the sex turned into a challenge too. 

We never talked so much about what we did, and who did the fucking sometimes came down to who won the wrestling match on the bed. If it had all been on strength, I’d have lost every time, I’m not stupid. But I knew a few tricks, and there were ways to get him pinned so’s he couldn’t get out without really hurting one of us and I knew he wouldn’t do that. Even so, I think Heero did the fucking more often than I did, but hey, I was easy; so long as I got off, that was okay with me. 

And Heero – well, maybe I’d gotten used to him, but I was pretty sure he genuinely eased up; I was getting more words out of him, and not just the mission stuff. We shared rooms and classes, yeah, but I wasn’t stuck on him like a leech. He could’ve made space for himself plenty of times, but he sat and ate right alongside me every meal instead of heading off to find his own corner. I didn’t pay so much attention to that ‘til I’d started looking so close at how he acted with Relena, and then it kinda stood out. 

All those deadpan insults he threw at me that used to have a big question mark hanging over ‘em, I knew for sure by then that was just how he rolled. He wouldn’t have been making sure I always tagged along with him if he meant any of it. And hey, it’s not like I don’t rag on my friends all the time, I’m just a bit more obviously up-in-your-face with the humour.

Don’t get me wrong, he was still _weird_ , obviously, but weird had made a sideways slither into comfortably normal.

Yeah, my life was pretty good. 

We both knew it wasn’t gonna last. We couldn’t have kept on kicking the shit out of OZ that way and getting away clean forever. 

It still came as one hell of a shock just how fast and how far it all fell apart.


	3. Chapter 3

It fell apart when Heero killed himself.

‘Cept he didn’t die, obviously, but it was a long time before we knew that.

We didn’t know a whole hell of a lot around then. 

The rest of us didn’t wanna suicide on the spot, and we couldn’t fight, not with a laser cannon half the size of the moon pointed at our homes and some OZ psycho threatening to blow them away. So we did the only thing we could – we scattered. 

And yeah, I scattered in the same general direction as Sandrock, and ended up tagging along after yet another guy I’d shared maybe ten minutes’ battle chat with. Starting to seem like something of a pattern with me, huh?

All Quatre could tell me about Heero was that it had hurt like a son-of-a-bitch, so he’d blocked it out. When he tried to ‘feel’ Heero again, he got nothing. I pushed him for more, but he said that was all he had and eventually I believed him. Well, in as much as I was ever gonna believe him. I never was real sure about that so-called Space Heart vibe of his, but he had those Maganacs convinced, and they didn’t seem like the kinda guys who’d swallow bullshit.

Nobody was picking up messages – Howard had evaporated like so much comet tail and G didn’t respond even to a basic ping. I figured they’d have dived deep underground after Heero’s old guy publicly outed himself to OZ; probably planned on staying that way ‘til they knew what the fall-out was gonna be. 

Quatre didn’t have much luck getting new info either. He didn’t even try contacting his family. Can’t say I blamed him on that – the chances of them knowing much that wasn’t publicly available were just too low to be worth the risk.

So yeah, we holed up too.

Quatre was amazing to have around back then. You know how many people you find in a war zone who are just genuinely nice? Not ‘cos they want something from you, not ‘cos they owe you, just ‘cos that’s how they are. I mean the guy had met me twice, both times in a Gundam, and Wufei had to stop me killing Trowa for one of them. And he just introduced me to his friends and took me into his secret hideouts, all at a time when we were kicked to the sidelines and figuring our part in the war was done. That’s what I mean by nice. Kinda stupid too, but then I guess he hadn’t been graced with a Heero thieving bastard experience to teach him any better. 

Even when that first base we hunkered down in was exposed and attacked, he just took me along with him to the next. 

Quatre was friendly, smart, and happy to kick back and waste some time doing nothing in particular with a guy. He was a soldier and a killer, sure, but he didn’t let that fuck with who he was underneath and I admired that. 

And I know what you’re most likely thinking, but no. It didn’t take me three hours to piece together the way Quatre’s voice changed when he talked about Trowa. Even offering something casual ran a big risk of turning messy. And then there was me spending most nights thinking about Heero…

But Heero was dead.

That mission stank right from the start, and it wasn’t like I didn’t spot it; everything about it screamed trap. Fuck, I’d even told him that. I still went, though – guess that doesn’t make me look very bright, huh? But I decided then the next time my gut had something to say, I’d listen to it and dig in hard. 

Too late for Heero.

The two months we spent at Quatre’s place was a breathing space of a kind. He had this fantastic estate at an oasis – enormous house, staff everywhere to run everything, millimetre-perfect manicured gardens, a pool – I sure as hell hadn’t seen anything like it. It was the kind of luxury I’d heard of but hardly believed existed when I was a kid. Pity it was an alcohol-free zone – that was one of the few times during the war I’d have felt safe acting like a teenager and getting drunk just for the hell of it. But every now and then, when I was just whiling away the time with Quatre or messing around with the Maganacs – some of them actually have a sense of humour, I swear – it’d hit me all over again that Heero had killed himself. 

I couldn’t even say it was a surprise, when I was being honest. I mean, we’d all been trained to die if we had to, and I’d seen enough of Heero in just those first couple of days to know he wouldn’t be looking for that other option as long and hard as I would. Still, it was one hell of a fucking waste.

Everything we did, it clicked, you know? The two of us, we fought well together and we fucked well together and I kept him from disappearing too far up his own ass. And after I figured him out some, I’d liked having him around. Not just for the missions. I liked him being there to chat with and eat with.

I chatted and ate with Quatre now, but one friend doesn’t just step in and replace another.

Bottom line was I’d trusted Heero, and while we were in those schools, there were only two people on the whole damn planet I’d have said that about. Though I’d added another couple of layers of security before I let him near Deathscythe again. There are some things that leave too big of an impression, and messing with my ‘Scythe is right up there in the ‘no forgiveness’ zone.

I trusted Quatre too, by then. That took maybe all of two days. 

I’ve always been good at shovelling on the charm – I know how to ramp up the smiles and get people on side. The cute kid schtick had been a survival strat for me years before I became a Gundam pilot. The trick to it’s judging in that first flat second who it’s gonna work on and when you gotta get the hell out. But Quatre wasn’t an operator that way; he just radiated earnestness and concern from those enormous eyes of his, and everybody within range of it wanted to make him happy. Those Maganacs would’ve done anything and everything he wanted, and it wasn’t so tough to see how they got there. 

That dedication wasn’t doing much for their life expectancy, but they weren’t exactly alone in that. Heero had only done what I’d likely need to do some day. I knew that and I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it.

The other big downer on us was the sheer frustration of spectating on a disaster with the slow inevitability of two container ships colliding. It was almost comfortable for a while there, chilling out in ridiculous luxury; but then we had these amazing mobile suits and all we could do was sit around and watch the news feeds as OZ launched their forces into space and started taking control out there too. The colonies were being squeezed between OZ and the Alliance and we could do absolutely fucking nothing. It’d been years since I’d felt that trapped and useless, and I didn’t like it any more than I had back then.

Sometimes I’d go back to my room at night and I’d just sit on the bed and I’d want to scream with the sheer, senseless waste of it all. But that would’ve been pointless too. It wouldn’t have changed a damn thing.

After a couple of months like that, we started picking up on some rumours – rumours that said maybe the Gundam pilot who hit the self-destruct at that supply base had survived.

I called it as so much bullshit; Heero was dead. It’d be stupid to start letting myself hope. 

But I guess some part of me grabbed onto the hope anyways – probably the part that had watched him fall fifty floors with a barely-open parachute and then stand up when he hit the bottom – ‘cos I found myself laying awake some nights wondering just how it might go if he showed up at Quatre’s door one day…

He never did. How the hell could he? Even if he was still alive somehow, he wouldn’t know where to come find us.

It was Quatre who finally saw our opportunity to break the cycle and switch things up. The minute OZ started playing nice with the colonies, we were free to go back to fighting without worrying about their pet psycho blasting our homes into atoms. So we set out to make the most blatant attack we could, half-crashing a transport plane onto a space port runway under fire and bursting outta the wreckage. Hi world, we’re on all your screens! So much for hiding the Gundams, huh?

But it worked. Wufei showed up alongside us. And then the other two hit the news as well, attacking a different space port half way round the planet, and Wing was right there on my screen feed, blasting at waves of Leos.

And it wasn’t just Wing. Could’ve been anybody inside that suit, right? ‘Cept it wasn’t anybody. Didn’t take me a minute to know it was Heero. I knew the way he fought and how he reacted, which way Wing would turn and _exactly_ what range he’d open up with the cannons when the Aries swept him in behind him.

But it was hardly the moment for a radio reunion, ‘cos we were getting hell shot out of us in our own battle at the time. I needed all my attention on my own skin, not his. Nataku helped, but it still wasn’t enough. 

Then Quatre sacrificed Sandrock so’s we could all get away in the mayhem. See what I mean about nice? Don’t think for a minute I would’ve done that, ‘cos as far as I was concerned the only way Deathscythe was going down was with me inside him.

OZ had a total stranglehold over Earth by then. We’d lost that war, and we knew it. So we launched ourselves back into space to stop OZ’s poison from spreading through our homes, and for me, at least, things crashed and burned faster than an asteroid in atmosphere.

*****

I don’t need to go into detail on that part, do I? It was plastered all over the feeds on every colony. Turned out OZ had been making some changes while we were on down time; I was way behind the curve, the Gundams had been built for a land war, not space combat, and the first battle I jumped on into, my ass was dragged to hell. And then it was my turn to pull a Heero and hit the self-destruct. I’d had the last two months thinking about it; it wasn’t so bad a choice.

It didn’t work. The connections were already shot. So me and Deathscythe got to be OZ’s big propaganda sell for the colonies – look, folks, we caught us a Gundam!

Not so much with the good times. I was beaten into slime, and dumped on the floor of an OZ cell, face down in a puddle of my own miserable self-recriminations.

Until Heero showed up. 

Course he did it in his own spectacularly fucked up Heero way.

When the door opened and he tossed the body of a guard onto the concrete, there was a second there where I thought he’d actually come for _me_. And then he pulled a gun on me.

I was still dumb enough to hope maybe it was a joke. I hauled my ass up off of the floor, and everything I could drag together of my self-respect, and played along with it. Oh, the drama! Shot with honour to avoid a public execution!

Until his finger started to tighten. Not something that made any sound, and not even something you could really see, unless maybe I caught the way the tendon shifted in the back of his hand. Or maybe I just knew Heero. Whatever the hell it was, I knew. 

It was the first time I’d laid eyes on Heero after all those months of thinking he was dead, and he was about to shoot me. _Hi Duo, long time no see, ready to die?_

I was absolutely fucking not ready to die, not while there was a second option to go with, but he was gonna do it anyways, and I couldn’t even suck enough air through my lungs to really yell at him. “Hey, you’re seriously gonna shoot me, aren’t you?” I mean, I tried, but it came out pretty pathetic by anybody’s standards, ‘specially mine.

“If that’s what you want.” But he always knew that wasn’t me, and everything swung on those seconds when he studied me from across the cell. 

The longest, heaviest seconds of my life went spinning out thinner and tighter, and then the tension slipped from his finger and he tossed his gun at me as he turned away to check the door. “Your right hand’s still okay?”

I caught it, obviously – he might’ve changed his mind again if I’d missed – and Heero leaned down to strip the weapons from that guard he’d wrecked.

I was hanging off of him to keep myself upright before we even left the cell. He’d always been freakishly strong – I guess it was all that working out he did – and that was one time I got to appreciate his muscles from a very different angle. I’m not gonna pretty it up and say I was a whole lotta use, ‘cos I wasn’t. It was Heero all the way. He blew some shit up with a bunch of pre-planted explosives, did a quick and tasty friend-or-foe hack that dumped the whole place into chaos, and he got us the hell out.

*****

Five hours later, I was sitting on a bed in a barely-furnished room that Heero was calling his apartment, swamped by an out-sized hospital-style gown he’d thieved from somewhere. It was the only thing related to clothes I could crawl into without wanting to scream. Pain’s one thing when your choice is to scramble or die, and something else when you stop and your adrenaline decides its job’s done for the day.

None of it improved my mood any. 

We’d patched up the worst of me, but I was playing it cautious with the pills. Didn’t wanna fuzz up my brain too much. ‘Safe’ was feeling like a pretty tenuous concept right about then.

And Heero had just told me he was leaving already. Off on another self-appointed mission. 

He was weirdly nice about it, but I didn’t want him to go.

Well, he said, “Stop complaining, just rest and heal up.” That’s nice by Heero standards. He didn’t _have_ to add the second part.

He was going after the lunar base, where they were turning out those new automated suits that took down me and ‘Scythe. It was a good target. Shutting it down would make a big dent in OZ. But he didn’t have a Gundam. He’d left Wing on earth ‘cos it wasn’t built for space. I’d shown just how bad it could go when we tried to kludge it.

Oh yeah, and he told me he’d stolen my name as a final throwaway, right when he walked out the door.

I was left sitting there, starting to shiver, and wondering if I could make myself move enough to turn up the heat.

I hadn’t said any of the things I should’ve said. Didn’t even say, “Don’t get too crazy,” ‘til after he’d shut the door. Not that it would’ve changed anything. He was being crazy enough just by going.

I mean, realistically, what the hell was I gonna say anyways? Hey, Heero, I’m glad you turned up not dead? True, but kinda obvious. Hey, Heero, I really missed you? _That_ would have made him wonder if I’d been kicked one too many times in the head. Hey, Heero, thanks for not splattering my brains across the wall of that cell? Hardly.

And that’s when I started to get really mad. 

_I can’t believe he was gonna fucking kill me._

Round and round in my head, screaming in there with every wave of pain. And that was a serious fuck load of pain. And yeah, I’d tried to do the job myself a couple of days before, but that was hardly the fucking point, was it?

_I can’t believe he was gonna fucking kill me!_

‘Cept I could. All too easily. I wasn’t exactly harbouring any illusions about Heero – mission first with him, every time, and people weighed in a long way back from that – but _I_ was part of the goddamn mission, and it would’ve been nice if the bastard had gone in there willing to maybe check me over before he made that call.

_I thought I was worth more than that to him, damn it!_

No, the OZ guys didn’t concuss me quite that bad. I didn’t mean the sex. Hell, I didn’t even mean me. I meant Shinigami.

He went into that base to shoot me. He’d planned on offing me and getting himself out of there because getting me out of there with him would be just too fucking hard. Like dragging his miserable ass out of an Alliance military hospital had been a light breeze on a summer’s day, and I did that after I’d met him for literally five fucking minutes!

After all I’d done in the goddamn war, I figured I’d proved I was worth _some_ fucking risk. Only fucking Heero fucking Yuy didn’t seem to fucking think so.

I was pretty pissed, in case you didn’t get that. It didn’t even make that much of a difference that he hadn’t actually done it. ‘Cos he’d thought about it. He’d run with the idea of killing me long enough and far enough to plan it all, and apparently he was fucking fine with it. 

Why the hell had I ever trusted him? I didn’t even know his fucking name.

I mean, I was from the colonies. Everybody knew who Heero Yuy was, even those of us who weren’t in line for a high end education. And sure, we were young enough, maybe Heero could’ve had the kind of parents who’d go out of their way to name a baby after some idealistic dead dude. But that would have to be one hell of a coincidence, right? That a kid who just happened to be named after a murdered independence leader just happened to be one of the five kids who ended up as Gundam pilots?

His name wasn’t Heero. I knew fuck all about him.

And no, I wasn’t living under the name I’d been handed at birth either, but I’d been wearing mine a good few years by then, since before I ever met G. Duo Maxwell was _me_ , not some alias I’d snatched up as a cover. His name was so meaningless to him, he’d just toss it away when it wasn’t convenient anymore and take mine instead.

I never should’ve trusted Heero. Hell, I knew that from day three, when he stole my fucking Gundam parts. He’d obviously never been so fucking dumb as to trust me!

It’s funny the things you realize, right when you’re thinking the opposite. 

‘Cos he did trust me. He always had. 

When I jacked us a transport plane to crash the party at New Edwards, he’d never seen me leave the ground, and he sat back and let me fly. And sure, if I’m stealing a plane, it’s obvious I know how to fly, right? But there’s a difference between being able to fly and being able to _fly_ and he let me fly. 

I hadn’t known Heero long enough then to get that it meant something. 

I knew it when I remembered it in that apartment.

He’d gone to that cell to kill me, and then he hadn’t.

Maybe I’d surprised him. Maybe he hadn’t expected to find anything but a pile of mush on the floor. It’s not like he was so far wrong, huh?

But there’d been enough of me left to make him stop. Not the best of me, not close hardly, but he’d talked instead of pulling the trigger, and then he’d rewritten the plan. Not something Heero was big on so much, switching up plans and improvising mid-way through.

The drugs must’ve finally kicked in some more then, ‘cos I was sitting there on his bed wrapped in bandages and a pale, floppy cape, and I reached up to scratch at the scabs on my cheek, and that’s when I realized I was crying.

*****

I lay around Heero’s apartment a couple of weeks while the worst of everything healed.

He’d hacked himself a credit line same as we always used to in the schools, or me a credit line technically, since he’d used my name to do it. I could order everything I needed and have it dropped off at the door. Which was food, mostly. He’d left me with a hefty supply of bandages and pills, ‘cos getting that kind of stuff through home delivery would be one big pointing finger. After a few days, I got to thinking further than eat, sleep and pain and ordered some actual clothes.

Heero didn’t come back from his mission. 

I watched every news feed I could find, and there was nothing. Nothing about any attack on the lunar base, successful or burned.

That was the biggest thing that came out of the dramatics of my own personal telenovela – OZ were so fucking embarrassed when they had to admit I’d up and vanished on them, they never tried to put any of us on parade like that again. It was radio silence where the Gundams and their pilots were concerned.

Maybe this time he really was dead. I’d barely gotten used to the idea that he was alive, and I was left staring at him being gone a second time.

The news did show me what happened with Quatre’s dad. Or enough that I could read the truth through the way they told it. When OZ moved deeper into the colonies, they wouldn’t let him stay neutral. It was the exact same bullshit as the old Alliance – if people didn’t play along, OZ played hardball. Most of the time it worked and everyone fell into line. And sometimes they pissed people off so much, they’d destroy everything just to hit back at them. 

Winner was one of the second type – he blew up his factory with him inside it, instead of letting OZ use it to build weapons. Quatre had stayed away from his family to protect them, but the war went and found them anyways.

I wondered where Quatre was now. If he was alive, he would’ve heard. But I didn’t know if any of us were alive.

When I could make it as far as the elevators without a limp, I slid out of Heero’s apartment with a cap pulled down low and my hair tucked away under my jacket. The mood on the streets was real ugly. I’d seen it on the feeds, but anything showing there was twisted OZ’s way, and I had to feel it out for myself before I could believe it. 

I believed it when I saw how the crowds were. The colonies had bought into OZ full on. All that, ‘We’re only here to save you from the Alliance, we’re your friends!’ bullshit, they’d swallowed it. And they’d turned on us. The Gundams. We were enemies of the state, hated by our own people.

Everything we’d done, we’d done for the colonies, and they flushed us down the khazi like so much sewage. In maybe a month, we’d gone from icons to terrorists.

But what was I s’posed to do different? The colonies were my home, whether they wanted me or not. I couldn’t step back and leave them to rot just ‘cos they’d fucked up. If I quit fighting without a win, then all we’d done was kill people.

Heero had the right idea with that lunar base. Even more after what Winner did, ‘cos OZ had all their mobile suit manufacturing left in one tempting, squishy basket. 

Heero had planned to sneak his way in, and that obviously hadn’t worked out so well, so I decided to get myself an invitation. If I signed up with OZ, I could just stroll in through the main door. 

My plan veered off course right off of the launch pad, with a lot of help from a loud-mouth called Hilde Schbeiker who took that bit too long figuring out whose side she was on.

You find the best of friends in the oddest places in this world. I sure as hell hadn’t been looking to find one at an OZ recruitment drive. But back then she hadn’t figured out yet that OZ were lying, manipulative creeps. She’d seen enough of me, though, to know I’d skirted past all the security checks, and she yelled the place down. In about five seconds, my covert infiltration mission turned into an under-planned and under-equipped one-man assault. 

It went better than it had any right to, really. I actually made it inside that base, after I saved Hilde from friendly fire by her own asshole officers, and then she returned the favour. I like to think I could’ve gotten the mission done. I’m pretty inventive on the fly. I’m almost sure I’d never have made it out again.

But instead I found Deathscythe, being rebuilt and upgraded by G and co. And their plan to game the system from the inside and my plan to blast the whole place into orbit and give the moon its own set of rings were running pretty much counter, so…

OZ didn’t beat me up nearly so bad the second time. Things to be grateful for, huh?

Then they threw me in a heap on the floor of a cell again. But this cell had Heero in it. And Wufei. 

“Screwed up the mission, did you?” 

It was a pretty typical Heero greeting, but hey, I had the satisfaction of knowing _I’d_ surrendered on purpose. 

Somehow, I never got a reunion with Heero that went anything like the one in my head. My version came with less bruises and more blow jobs. At least he was telling me not to die this time instead of planning on taking me out himself. I counted that a pretty big win.

At least he wasn’t dead. Again.

Heero looked almost annoyingly healthy for somebody who’d been hanging out with OZ for the better part of a month. I decided when I was a bit more together, I was gonna have to ask him how he got them to treat him so nice. 

Wufei being there wasn’t much of a surprise – I’d seen his Nataku standing in the hangar next to Deathscythe – and I got to salvage my dignity by passing along the message that our Gundams were being space-prepped for us. 

There wasn’t ever gonna be a whole lot of casual chit-chat going on in an OZ cell, with or without Wufei. We were trained professionals. But when I dragged my ass off of the floor and onto the nearest bit of concrete step that was passing as a bench, Heero shifted round to sit that bit closer. 

Funny how it’s the little things can make a lousy situation feel so much less shitty.

I couldn’t really look at him, not the way I wanted to – OZ already had enough control over us without handing them more – but I let my eyes slide half-closed and peered sideways through my lashes and listened to him breathe. 

Sometimes… sometimes I thought I caught him watching me the same way. 

Most likely that was my aching head feeding me what I wanted to hold me together.

The two of them had already crawled over every centimetre of concrete in that cell and I triple-checked, soon as I felt up to it. We never found a single surveillance device. Maybe that was Trowa’s doing. Maybe he convinced them we couldn’t cause trouble from inside of a bare room and us wearing handcuffs. And we actually couldn’t, so it wasn’t even a lie.

Trowa was probably the smartest of all of us, you know? When he got back out to the colonies, he did his research and he figured out the wind had switched direction on us. Handed himself over to OZ as a defector and got himself right into the middle of their plan to build their own knock-off Gundams. Then he sweet-talked them into letting Heero on board with the R&D too. Between the two of them, they knew every detail and every capability of OZ’s new weaponry.

It was a good scheme. Would never have worked for me though. I couldn’t have saluted and smiled at those OZ fuckers longer than a day or two before I cracked. 

Heero couldn’t have done it either. Too impulsive, too angry. He would’ve seen something that pissed him off enough eventually and blown it all apart. The way Trowa roped him in, he worked with OZ, but he didn’t have to pretend he liked ‘em.

Wufei might’ve pulled it off. Depending. He had that whole meditation thing going on, and most of the time he was calm, collected, analytical. A hell of a lot more than me, anyways, but I was setting the low bar for the group.

Other than when OZ forced us into cell-sharing, Wufei never spent much time with any of us. I hung out with Quatre and Heero at different times during the war. Quatre had Trowa at his place for a while before me, and Trowa and Heero were together the whole time Heero was recovering after he blew up Wing. 

Wufei – far as I can figure, he spent most of the war alone, and I don’t think it worked so well for him. When his meditation deal broke down and he lost cool and calm, he lost it light years beyond any of us.

Quatre was nearly as smart as Trowa, the way I read it. He was smart enough to have stayed the hell away from OZ and not be locked up with the rest of us anyways.

I was almost right there – he was being smart, sort of. He poured what was left of his family’s manufacturing into building Zero, a Gundam our mad scientist quintet had designed and then left as a blueprint. Turned out it had stayed on paper with damn good reason.

It all sounds so great at first. Hook the mobile suit into your brain, and it knows what you’re thinking, calculates the quickest way to get it done in a microsecond and boom! Makes you a lot faster than the guy who’s still working through the strats in his own head. Makes him so easy to take down.

You ever have a thought and then realize it’s a bad one? Ever feel like punching your boss in the face or landing one on that real asshole customer? With Zero, your boss would be laid out flat before you ever got that third millisecond to think, ‘Hey, no, that would get me fired.’ And then the machine’s inside your head telling you that now you’ve gone this far, you might as well hit him again – you’ve got nothing more to lose, right? If you’re gonna go down for this, let’s go all out!

A few pilots – like one hand few – eventually managed to get a handle on the thing and not go full-on kill crazy or stroke their brains out. The ones who were willing to keep on climbing right back in, risking their lives and everybody else’s while they figured it out. Heero was one of them. Quatre was another, but he only did it out of desperation, not choice. And nobody ever got it to work the first time they hooked themselves up.

We found out those details later. At the time we only knew that Trowa pulled Heero away to take OZ’s latest mechs out against some strange new Gundam that was carving apart whole colonies.

Me and Wufei were left behind sitting in that cell, and we studied the upgraded specs on our Gundams that Trowa had slipped us, ‘til something got all fucked up inside of that base. 

The first we knew of it was when somebody switched off the ventilation to the cells, and that quiet little background hum we’d been living with for days stopped. And then some thirty minutes after, the oxygen levels dropped and we started to slowly suffocate.

I’m not gonna go to into details on that. It’s not a place I ever wanna go back to, though my brain has other ideas sometimes and it comes full speed to get me in the night – then when we were right on the edge of passing out, the doors across the whole prison block all opened up at once and we were loose.

I grabbed Deathscythe and got the hell out, carving a trail through OZ along the way. Wufei took Nataku and went off someplace different. Like I said, he never stuck with any of us by choice.

I holed up in stealth a few days while I got a feel for the situation. Turned out there’d been some kind of internal coup and OZ had itself a new leader, one who hated Gundams more than most. 

Standing orders now was to kill any of us on sight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Well, I warned you at the start that this fic was an info-dumpy hell, and this chapter was the worst of it! I trapped myself in a corner where I was basically stuck with summarising the plot of Gundam Wing whenever Heero and Duo weren't together (which was, sadly, most of it). And also any time they were together for a short period with no scope to insert extra scenes. I just have to hope that my Duo voice is entertaining enough to keep people reading. So if you're still here, thank you! There will be more info-dump coming, it just won't be quite as relentlessly unbroken...


	4. Chapter 4

There was more to it than a change at the top. There always is. Not everybody likes change, and suddenly there was the Treize faction fighting OZ from the inside, as well as the last of the Alliance stragglers still chewing on their ankles from outside. 

That was all was fine by me. When they killed each other off, less of them were left cluttering up the colonies for me to deal with.

G and his pals had gotten Deathscythe fully set for space flight, but the upgrades to his weapons systems weren’t finished. I had the specs, I just needed some breathing space and equipment to do the job. I wasn’t gonna hurl myself into a war under-equipped again, ‘specially not with those new orders. More time in a cell wasn’t on the list of bad outcomes any more.

I went and found Hilde. 

It might’ve seemed like a dumb thing to do, but I knew it wasn’t. Sure, she’d screwed me over at first, but in the end, she’d risked her neck and laid down the covering fire to give me my shot at that base. Not a choice she’d have made on a whim, and I wanted to tell her thanks, ‘cos I’d been a bit too busy to do it at the time. 

And yeah, I wanted to make sure she was okay.

She wasn’t hard to track down. The Schbeiker name wasn’t up there in Winner territory, nowhere close, but they had a few places across the bigger colonies, and I found her running one of the family’s scrapyards.

I scoped the place out for a couple of days and never saw any OZ types come near it. So I pulled my baseball cap low and went and knocked on her door.

I gave her my best grin when she opened up. “Hi.”

It took her a second to get past that first wave of shock, then she was checking behind me and all around, before her eyes dropped back onto me. “You’re still alive.”

“So are you,” I said brightly.

She tilted her head and looked me over. “You want to come in? I have coffee.”

I stayed where I was, hanging a half metre back from her step. “You sure you’re down with harbouring a criminal?” Last time she’d done what had to be done, but she didn’t need to be inviting in trouble.

“I worked with enough of them,” she said. “The ones wearing a uniform. I think I can deal with one more.”

“Seems to me like you deal just fine with most things,” I said, my smile sliding right back into place, and I followed her on in. 

It wasn’t a big place she had, but it was an actual house, not like that matchbox apartment Heero had left me in. She had coffee already in the pot, and I watched her rattle round the kitchen, pulling out mugs and milk and spoons. She looked to be fine, physically anyways, moving easy and smooth, no give and no hesitation.

She led me through into a room with a sofa and chair and we settled ourselves in, low table for the tray between us.

I took a cautious sip of my coffee – still too hot, but that never stopped me. “So you got yourself clear of OZ?”

“I was declared unreliable,” she said, smiling slow and rueful. “I scored well enough in the sims, but put me in an actual battle, and I’d either freeze up and do nothing, or panic and start blasting at random. Nobody ever knew which it was going to be.”

“They kicked you out.”

“They said I could have an office job in recruitment. I said if I wasn’t going to be flying, there were other desks I could sit at and be useful.”

She was genuinely good at recruitment, and she was too young to have served out a standard term. “Hard to believe they let you go that easy.”

“A few of the officers wanted me court-martialled for sabotage and treason.” Her smile had dropped off now, and yeah, that part couldn’t have been any fun. “There just wasn’t any proof to beat my incompetence defence. They were glad enough to see me gone.”

“The data recorders in your suit?”

“They weren’t working.” Her eyes went all wide and innocent over the top of her coffee cup. “Turned out they hadn’t recorded a thing. OZ are manufacturing suits so fast right now, there are always some quality control issues.”

She was more than just a decent person; she was smart enough to fix herself an exit even when she was right in the middle of everything. “You did good, Hilde. I’m glad you’re out of it.”

“It might have helped that my family have recycling and supply contracts with OZ,” she said. “I’m on board a boat they didn’t want to rock.”

She was right for sure on that score. If she’d been some poor schmuck nobody, she’d have gotten the full interrogation treatment after a most-wanted type escaped while she had a ‘freak out’.

“What about you?” she asked, peering at me across the table. “Did you do good?”

Obviously she knew I hadn’t taken out the lunar base. That would’ve been hard to miss. “Ah, there was kind of a change of plan. The rest of it’s still being worked out.”

“I’m guessing I shouldn’t ask about that.”

“Yeah, not really.”

She set her mug back down on the tray. “Where are you staying?”

“Here and there.” I was sleeping in Deathscythe. He was easily the most secure spot I was gonna find. 

“I’m guessing neither here nor there has a shower.”

I looked down at my lap where my fingers were flicking at the end of my hair. “Uh, no. Uh, sorry.” Hygiene hadn’t been a priority, and not much of a possibility either. 

She pointed off to her left, at the hallway. “The bathroom’s that way, third door along. There are towels in the cupboard. If you want.”

It could still have been a set up. She’d helped me before, but it had cost her. Maybe she regretted it. Maybe she was looking for a way back in with OZ.

Like I said, I learned as a kid to judge people fast and well, and that wasn’t Hilde. She’d decided she wasn’t on board with the way OZ tossed its recruits out into space as disposable cannon fodder, and she wouldn’t be backing down now.

I took the shower. Course I kept my pistol on the ledge inside the stall. Just ‘cos Hilde wouldn’t sell me out, didn’t mean other people weren’t watching.

Damn, it felt good. It had been a couple of weeks since I’d gotten the chance to shower. The five minute lukewarm rinse I was granted as an OZ prisoner didn’t count. I could have stayed in there an hour, all hot water and soap and thoroughly detangling my hair, but I didn’t wanna push my welcome too far, so I kept it under twenty minutes.

When I came back out, she offered me the coffee mug again. “Here. I kept it warm for you.”

I shook my head and didn’t sit down. “I need to get going.” I’d been there too long already. If anybody had seen me show up and called it in, the shit would be real close by.

“Okay.” She set the mug aside and followed me along the hallway. “If you come by again, I’ll still have coffee. And a shower,” she added with a smile.

I turned in the doorway, gave her a wave and my biggest grin. “Thanks,” I said, and I meant it for everything. I’d gone there to tell her that, and then I never actually had.

Coffee and a shower were great, but nothing was so good as a friend.

*****

I went back the next day, checking thoroughly for watchers first. And the day after.

And then Hilde said all that coming and going was pointless and let me crash at her place. She even found me a warehouse close by to stash ‘Scythe. 

She’d tagged me as gay, obviously. Don’t figure she’d have been so quick to tell me to stay if she’d had doubts left over on that score.

As a bonus, between OZ and her family’s salvage contacts, she knew people who could get their hands on mech parts and fuel. 

It turned out there were still people in the colonies who were on our side. It was barely two months since my face had been all over the feeds, and I met suppliers who only had to spend five minutes with me and my high-end mech supply wish-list before I got what me and Hilde took to calling The Revelation Look, and then they stopped with the questions and handed the goods over. Sometimes they wouldn’t even take my money.

It made a difference then. To know there was somebody who hadn’t rejected us, who still thought we mattered, and who’d go outta their way to help. 

That radio silence on the Gundams I talked about? That order was still running strong. I heard nothing about the others, no matter how deep I dug. Heero and Trowa had gone off to stop that unknown Gundam, and I couldn’t find a damn thing about it in any records system I could get myself into. But no more colonies had been sliced and diced, so that had to mean they won, right?

I did what I could. Attacked a few OZ suit convoys and took out twenty or thirty each time, but they could make ‘em faster then I could shoot ‘em. Even doing that much got harder when they upgraded the security again, and I didn’t know where the transports were gonna be. Hilde’s contacts still inside OZ couldn’t get us the info; after I blew away three of those shipments, it was all on need-to-know lockdown.

I’d already done too much, though. Hit too hard too close to home one too many times, and some OZ fuck tracked me back to the salvage yard.

Lucky for me, he wasn’t a fan of the latest regime either. He didn’t wanna destroy Gundams and their pilots, he was fixated on figuring out how to make Zero work. Well, he picked the wrong Gundam pilot for _that_ , ‘cos all I wanted was to get the goddamn fucking thing outta my head. 

I guess obsession’s not a good way to go when you’re poking around with weird new tech. The list of bad outcomes with Zero I talked about? That OZ fanatic collected the full set. He went kill crazy and _then_ he stroked his brain out. 

What I got out of it was I couldn’t keep on trying to wage a war on my own.

I poked around for a few days and I tracked down a couple of resistance groups, anti-OZ colonists who were looking to press for independence, and willing to go with some direct action to get it. But truth was they were never going anywhere. Small as they were, they’d already started fighting among themselves, arguing over whether or not they should hook up with the Treize faction from the old Alliance to rid themselves of OZ.

Is the enemy of my enemy my friend? Well maybe that depends, but if you’re taking that road, you’re gonna have to ask yourself what you’ll do tomorrow morning when you wake up and see just who it is you’ve got sleeping alongside you.

I couldn’t do a damn thing alone, and there wasn’t any faction I could stomach taking so much as a one-night stand with. So I stopped.

I did nothing. I helped Hilde with the salvage business, but so far as the war went, I stayed out of it.

Hilde was the best, about everything. She didn’t just put me up, and back me up whichever way I decided to go, she put up with me when I wasn’t being such a great house-mate. 

I tried to keep the worst of it from her, but she knew there were some nights I didn’t sleep so good. The next morning I’d be run down and raw, and she’d be sweet and concerned and wanting to help, and I didn’t wanna put all of that stuff on her, you know? And mostly I could laugh it off and brush her away, get her believing I was fine, but a couple of times she’d poke in just the wrong place and I needed her to stop and I ended up yelling. And still she never kicked me out.

And no, it wasn’t ‘cos she was scared to tell me to go. I never saw Hilde scared of anything – not OZ, not hurling herself headlong into a firefight, and definitely not me. Hilde didn’t get scared, she got angry, and if she thought shit needed doing, she did it. She let me stay ‘cos she wanted to, and she faced down my bad days ‘cos she was a friend.

I heard some rumours after a while that Gundams had been seen fighting for Sanc Kingdom on earth. The military weren’t reporting on it, even internally, and the media wouldn’t say anything OZ didn’t want them to, but people still talk, and gossip like that made it all the way from earth out to the colonies.

I figured the rumours were real. Relena had kept our secret all that time we were shifting between schools; I could buy she’d still be willing to cover for us, even while she was up there on all the feeds preaching pacifism.

Yeah, she’d kept our secret, not just Heero’s. She couldn’t have known the finer points about me back then – unlike Heero, I stopped short of sticking my Gundam right up in her face – but she’d seen me use a gun at that naval base, and Heero never spent more than five minutes with anybody but me, and she wasn’t dumb. A bit silly, sometimes, sure, but not dumb. She’d always known I wasn’t in it for the education.

I got to wondering who might be with her in Sanc – Quatre most likely, he was always into the political schtick more than the rest of us, and he fitted right in with the rich crowd. Maybe he had Trowa with him again? Or Heero? Not Wufei for sure, he always did his own thing. 

Then I heard Sanc Kingdom surrendered, and a few days later Relena was parading around as OZ’s shiny new figurehead and calling herself a queen, so what the hell did I know?

Me and Hilde, we carried on, day to day. We ran the salvage yard. We spent time in the park, playing fetch with the dogs. Even went on an outing to the circus, and, well, we found Trowa there. I was so fucking happy to know for sure he was alive. But Trowa had issues of his own, and a real spiky sister who knew exactly what I was and didn’t want me anywhere near.

But if Trowa was alive, when the last I’d seen he was heading out to fight with Heero, then Heero would still be out there somewhere too. He had to be. He always was.

It was like that time I’d spent with Quatre all over again. Life was almost nice, and me and Hilde had everything we needed, and we could chill out and spend whole days and evenings doing whatever the hell we wanted.

But that wasn’t what I wanted. Not when there were evil fuckers controlling my home and somebody else was out there fighting my war, and all I could do was sit on Hilde’s sofa and watch everything happen on the news.

*****

It was Hilde who tracked down Quatre.

Not deliberately – she had no clue who Quatre was, outside of his Winner name. I trusted her with my life no question, but I wasn’t gonna go spilling other people’s secrets. Hilde saw that the Winner mining satellites were hiring mobile suit workers, opening up again for the first time since Quatre’s dad killed himself, and I guessed it meant there’d been a change in the management.

I sneaked myself inside the company HQ and found Quatre up on one of the top floors.

He must’ve been as relieved to slap eyes on me as I was on him, ‘cos I hadn’t been grabbed and hugged like that in years. Not since… well, not since G took me on for sure. A lot of work and a fair bit of fun among G’s crew, but I never met any cuddlers in the bunch.

Quatre kicked out his entourage of corporate types and bodyguards and got us into an office without any bugs. A really big office, with lots of carpet and space and not many chairs.

“Nice building,” I said. Probably an understatement, if you were into seventy floors of steel and glass. It’s not like I’d have any idea what to do with it if someone handed one to me. I stared out the window, at the view of the colony ring arcing away – from up here, you could see all the way to the other side. “Is this all yours now?”

I didn’t just mean the building. Most of the colony was Winner assets, Winner manufacturing, Winner housing. I knew that already, sure, but it was something else looking at it all laid out that way.

“Nothing is yet,” Quatre said quietly. “My sisters are managing all the corporation’s assets. Everyone else still thinks I’m missing.”

That told me everything that mattered right there. He’d hidden his identity longer than any of us, but OZ must know who he was now. Not even the Winners had enough money and influence to protect a Gundam pilot.

And that was the small talk done, ‘cos I needed to know the big stuff. “Where were you?”

“Earth,” he said simply. “I went with Heero to figure out what we should be doing.”

See? I’d believed Heero was alive all along. I’d thought he was dead twice before and both times he’d popped up again just fine. This time I’d convinced myself he would’ve come out the other side of that fight along with Trowa, and I was right. Course I was.

It was still damn good to be told it for a fact though.

“So, what did you come up with?” It would’ve been nice if somebody could just tell me what to do, ‘cos I sure as hell hadn’t managed to sort through the world’s messes on my own.

He told me about Sanc then. That the one thing Earth and the colonies had in common was that there were good people in both. He still believed in the pacifism thing, even after OZ had crushed Sanc and Relena’s ideal for it like some particularly ugly cockroach.

And I was left wondering what Heero was thinking after all of it. Quatre talked like he’d been a fully paid up subscriber, said he’d supported Relena the whole way, even while he waged a war to buy her time to make peace happen. Protect Relena and Sanc at all costs, that had become the new front for the war. Did Heero still believe it too?

I straightened up from the wall I’d been lounging against, took a couple of steps towards Quatre’s chair. “Where’s Heero now? What happened when Sanc surrendered?”

“I don’t know any more after that. I came back here to try and find the rest of you.” Quatre’s fingers tapped lightly on the arm of his chair, his face tilted up at me. “Heero stayed on Earth and carried on fighting, I think.”

That sounded like Heero. He’d been given a mission, and he’d never let it go, even when the cause was already dead in the water and the only end in sight was for him to drown right alongside it.

Me, I’d got no enthusiasm for killing unless it looked like there was a point to it, that maybe we could _change_ something by doing it. Quatre wasn’t giving me that. He was painting a picture of a very pretty dream, and he was no nearer knowing how to get there than I was.

I pulled my jacket back on over my hair, and slapped my cap on my head, same as when I’d come in. “Well, if you manage to haul the others together and come up with some kind of a plan, just let me know. I’ll still be around!”

I told him where to find Trowa, right before I left.

*****

I went back to Hilde’s place. She wanted me there, and I helped with the salvage yard, and that was more use than I’d been finding for myself anywhere else.

Like everything in the war, that wasn’t gonna last either. 

That OZ rogue had been the first to track me down, but he wasn’t the end of it. White Fang turned up at Hilde’s door then, trying to tell me they were fighting for the colonies.

Hilde didn’t really get why I turned ‘em down, and I don’t s’pose she’d be the only one. I looked at how they were taking over the neighbourhoods, lording it over everyone in their armbands and making demands like they were so special, and they were acting no different from OZ. When I told ‘em I wasn’t interested, they tried to bulldoze me into joining. Can you believe it? They were threatening _me._ Ha! Like that was ever gonna work. But it was trouble Hilde didn’t need to have, and it was gonna keep on coming for as long as I stuck around. 

Hilde reminded me too much of me. Me before I went to Earth, all bound up in enthusiasm and ideals of I how was gonna change the world, and a crazy illusion of my own invulnerability. I didn’t wanna see her get the last of that kicked out of her. 

So I got the hell out of her world, and me and ‘Scythe went back into space to look for any fight I might want.

*****

I found a fight. And another one. They weren’t hard to come by – pretty much any sector of space had become a battleground round about then. Most of them I kept stealth and stayed out of. OZ taking on White Fang was just another win-win so far as I was concerned, no skin of mine in that game.

Then I found OZ attacking a lone transport shuttle. It was a whole lot of firepower for one miserable target, more than enough to make me curious, and I stealthed up closer. ‘Til Sandrock popped out of the shuttle, and that’s when I dived right on in. 

Trapped between me and Quatre, OZ didn’t do so well. Guess they lasted long enough to broadcast a scream for help, though, ‘cos that’s when Howard beamed a message over ‘Scythe’s secure channel. “Hey, Duo, come on in!”

“Howard!” I hadn’t heard a thing from him since I was on earth, back at the start of the year. “What the hell are you doing out here?”

“Take a look!”

S’posedly secure or not, he wasn’t gonna beam everything, but I got to see enough. I’d left him on a cargo ship, the kind that floated on actual water, and now he was in space in a – “A battleship? You’re on a fucking battleship? Where the fuck d’you get one of those?”

“Oh, I’ve had her for a while. I was keeping her ready for a rainy day.”

“You telling me you had a fucking battleship stashed in the colonies the whole time and you never fucking said? Fuck, Howard, that might’ve been good to know sooner!”

“If you don’t stop yelling and get over here, I’m leaving without you!”

“All right, all right, hold up, we’re coming in!”

Trowa and Noin were on that shuttle with Quatre too, so that’s how we all ended up on the Peacemillion. 

I wasn’t too sure about Noin, myself – pretty much all I knew about her was she used to be OZ. And yeah, Hilde used to be OZ too, but she was on the peripheries, one of the little people they conned and used. Noin had been right in there from the start, hanging out with all those rich Romefeller types who ran the show, but Quatre reckoned she was sound, and I trusted Quatre, no question.

There were more of us then, all talking ‘bout the state of the war, and still none of us had any idea of a side ‘cept our own. Zechs-Milliardo-whatever-the-hell-he-was-calling-himself-this-month showed up at the head of White Fang, and they were beating OZ back by the day. 

Noin wanted to go talk to him – seemed like they’d been pretty tight back when they were both in OZ – and we weren’t gonna let anybody head in alone, so the three of us tagged along in our mechs. Damn good thing too, ‘cos Zechs wasn’t much of a talker; he went for us full on in another one of those new, crazy-evil Zero suits, and then he veered off and blew away OZ’s last stronghold and most of their command structure instead. Some combo of him and the machine must’ve decided we were the lower priority target for the hour.

There was gonna be no more sneaking for us after that; anyone who wasn’t for White Fang was their enemy, and it was all-out war, whether we asked for it or not.

Guess everybody came to the same conclusion there, ‘cos the next day Sally Po turned up with Heero in tow, and even Wufei was along for the ride, cautiously agreeing he’d throw himself in with the rest of us for a while.

I hadn’t seen Heero in months, not since the cell in that lunar base. Fuck, it was good to see him again. Good like you can’t believe. 

He looked amazing. Lounging against the rail of the hangar catwalk, all casual, scanning his eyes over the Gundams. Not that there’d be anything casual in that part; he’d be picking out every detail of the changes we’d made to the propulsion and the weaponry.

He was wearing the same clothes he’d always preferred for kicking back – the tank that showed all the muscles shifting in his bare arms, the shorts that clung in one smooth line along the length of his ass and thighs. The clothes that had first given me a raging hard-on for him back at the start of the year, before I even knew a goddamn thing about him.

I was staring, fixated, and I nearly fell over my own feet with just how much I wanted to kiss him.

In the suit hangar. In front of Wufei and Quatre, with Sally and Noin probably still lurking around somewhere. Right. Not too hard to imagine how that might’ve gone, huh?

So I played up my usual Heero-baiting routine, and honestly, it was good enough just to have everybody together and all of us still alive, and we headed on up to the mess deck to grab food. “Hey, Howard, I brought you some late arrivals! Everybody, this is Howard, it’s his ship you’re on, so make nice! Howard, this is Wufei, you can take one guess who he is.”

“Thank you for letting us visit,” Wufei said.

“You’re welcome.” Howard took his formal cue from Wufei.

“The lady here’s Sally Po. I don’t know her, but if she can talk Wufei around, she’s gotta be something!”

“Sally’s definitely something,” Noin said, with a smile. “In the best ways.”

“And then, well, yeah, you already met Heero.” Howard was doing a maybe-not-so-unreasonable amount of glaring over having Heero on board – his only direct experience had been with Heero the thief. “I know, I know, but it’s not gonna be like last time, he'll behave himself, right, Heero?”

“He’d better,” Howard grumbled, only half under his breath, but he took my word for it.

I was sticking my neck out a bit there, ‘cos I knew under the right set of circumstances, with a big enough motivation, Heero absolutely would do it again. But only if he was down to desperation, with something so time critical he couldn’t stop to ask. He’d progressed a long ways past any _casual_ thieving.

I went looking for him after we were all done eating; he was back in the hangar, unsurprisingly, working on that Wing Zero nightmare he’d dragged in with him. 

I like my brain to be my own, and I sure as hell don’t want some machine digging around in there, looking to act out the worst of my every passing thoughts. I’d been dumped inside of Zero once, and I’d seriously consider putting a gun to my head before I let it happen again. Damn thing scared every last piece of shit out of me.

You figured I'd be too proud to say that, huh? You're thinking of the wrong guy – self-deception's not my thing. I wouldn’t wanna touch that suit even at one remove, but he was perched up there in the cockpit door with his laptop hooked in, running diagnostics and analysis.

I stuck my elbows on the gantry railing, my chin propped on my hands. “Hey, Heero! How was your jaunt to Earth this time round?”

“Messy.” He didn’t look away from the screen, but I’d gotten used to that a long time back.

“Not so different from the first time then, I guess.” I tipped my head up a bit more, gave myself a better look at him. “So what d’you make of the Queen Relena routine? That was a big switch in mood, huh?”

“She wanted to reform Romefeller from the inside.”

Not speculation – he said it like he knew. Quatre had it right, he must’ve been cozy with her, and not just before Sanc crashed down – he’d kept track of her after too. “Well, good luck with that! Not like a change in leadership or three’s made any difference up ‘til now.” Romefeller, OZ, so far as I was concerned they were the same damn thing, whatever polite distinction in the lines they liked to paint for themselves.

His fingers stopped on the keys, the hangar space dropping into silence without the endless rattle. “No, it was working,” he said quietly. “That’s why they pushed her out again.” 

It was only when he said it that I realized I hadn’t seen Relena giving her speeches on the feeds the last week. I’d been paying all my attention to the war going on in the colonies, not whatever political wranglings were happening on Earth. “Looks like that gig didn’t last so long, then. Wonder what she’s up to now?”

He was back on the keys again, the tapping echoing all through the hangar. “Depends on what they let her do.”

“Well, I guess there’s always that.” OZ were never half so quick at locking up the rich and influential as they were with the rest of us, but they’d been known to go with house arrest for some of their own now and then. 

Me, I didn’t see why so many people made Relena out to be such a big, impressive deal, but if she’d gotten Heero’s respect, there’d have to be something in there I’d missed. 

Realistically, I’d never bothered looking. I didn’t waste too much of my time thinking ‘bout any of the rich and privileged types we were surrounded by while we flitted our way through those schools, and I’d only checked out Relena as a risk, not an ally.

But Relena wasn’t any kind of priority for me. Heero was, and he was gonna stick himself inside the craziest, most dangerous piece of kit anybody ever built. “You know, Heero, I saw a guy mush his brain into garbage, he pushed so hard to get his head around that thing.”

He didn’t stop typing that time, but I saw the tension flicker through him all the same. “I’ve known people come close.”

Anybody who wasn't wary as a hen in the fox den around the Zero system was a dead guy; at least Heero had a pretty solid grip on that.

Maybe that’s why he could control it. He knew enough to keep his guard up, but Heero never had been scared, either to act, or to die.

“You still gonna fly it?” I knew the answer already, but sometimes you just gotta make a point.

“The old Gundams aren’t enough anymore.”

“Hey! Speak for yourself!” I never gave any kinda fucks what people might say against me, but nobody got to slander my ‘Scythe. “I’ll put me and Deathscythe up against anybody in that thing, and I’ll come out on top!”

He finally looked up from the screen then, over at Deathscythe with all the latest mods, and he’d already have dug his way through every last detail of what me and G had done to upgrade him. Then he dipped his head down at me, that same analytical stare that went right through me for days.

“Maybe, yeah,” he said. 

Heero didn’t say things to appease anybody, and I figured it was probably the biggest compliment I was ever gonna get.

It was irrelevant anyways. Nobody was gonna be fighting one on one. It was all battleships and assault teams that far into the war. 

With no HQ and losing troops by the hour, OZ decided their best outlook was to take an entire colony hostage. Guess that should’ve come as a surprise to no-one, honestly, they had history with that tactic from back in the spring. Me, Trowa and Quatre took out the OZ forces holding the colony, but White Fang retaliated anyways, blasting a shot from Libra down at the earth and threatening to do a whole fuck of a lot more.

It wasn’t our war; it was exactly what we’d run the fuck away from. We went to earth and fought guerrilla-style ‘cos we bailed on any scenario where the bastards in charge played poker with whole populations. But we were stuck in the middle of it then, whatever we wanted or didn’t want of it.

Those were hellish days that came after. Wave after wave of mobile dolls White Fang sent out at us. There was barely time to patch up the Gundams, even with Howard’s crew running shifts 24/7, let alone come down off of the battle high long enough to get some real sleep. Can't speak for the others, but I wasn't eating enough to keep it up. You ever tried eating when you're on adrenaline overload? Food tastes like ash and your stomach cramps up after the first few mouthfuls. The only way round it is to eat what you can every couple of hours, but that's kinda hard when you spend half the day in a Gundam.

Zechs’s plan was to grind us down into dirt, and it was working. The lack of sleep, the tension and the constant interruptions, that was nothing new. We'd all done it before. But the battles we were fighting this time gave nothing back. 

There's no satisfaction taking down a troop of mobile dolls. Sure, it's a high at the time, getting a hook on a tricky opponent and seeing the explosions as you blast the shit out of them. But back on Peacemillion, we knew we weren't achieving a goddamn thing. We weren't shortening the war, we weren't changing the odds, we weren't saving anybody's lives but our own. And while guarding your own ass is a damn good reason to fight, it wasn't what _we_ were there for.

We fought. We ate. We slept. We re-armed the Gundams and we shovelled in a few pathetic mouthfuls of food and then we went out and fought again. Sometimes I managed to squeeze in a shower. They were full-on Shinigami days, with not a whole lotta time left over for me.

I was worn out, bitter and frustrated as all hell. 

Yeah, I could really have done with him being there then. I wanted him. I wanted him pushed up against me, hard and desperate. I wanted his lips on me, sucking the blood up through my skin 'til it left marks. I wanted the look in his eyes when he gave up that control and everything he was fixated on _me_. I wanted to fuck and be fucked all the way outta my head, just so’s I could forget for one second.

But there wasn’t time or effort for anything outside of keeping ourselves alive. Some days I’d find myself forcing food down my throat at almost the same time as Heero. Some days I barely passed him in the hallways long enough to say hi. I couldn’t even drag up the energy to jerk myself off in the shower most times.

And Heero – well, he wasn’t out there scrambling to keep the White Fang hordes back from Peacemillion so often as the rest of us. He spent more time in the hangar, working on that horror of a suit he flew. And I got that he needed to stay on it, that he had to make that fucking monster as safe as he could make it, and I was real glad he saw it too. 

But I got to thinking some other things as well – got to wondering with all the stress and exhaustion we were living with, if maybe having to fight with that thing inside of his head didn’t make it that much worse. If maybe he couldn’t stick with it so long as the rest of us because he’d never stay sane.

There wasn’t a time to ask him, and he’d never have stopped long enough to answer. But worry? Yeah, funnily enough, I always found the time to do that. 

It was Hilde who ended the hopeless stalemate when she showed up in a mobile suit, all shot to hell and clutching the hacked Libra specs. That girl was just as brave and just as crazy as any of us. She didn’t have the skills of a Gundam pilot, but she did what she was good at. 

Wars are full of people like Hilde – people who give everything and do just enough and get forgotten. People will always talk about the Gundam pilots, but they don't remember that we were getting our asses shot up day after day and wondering just what the hell we were s’posed to do about it. She figured out her own way to help end the war, and she didn’t even have to kill anybody to do it.

Hilde was as good a friend as any criminal on the run could ever have hoped to find. I sat with her for a couple of hours in the med ward, 'til we were sure she was gonna be okay. And when I looked round again, Heero had gone racing off to the Libra to rescue Relena.

Sure, I knew all along. Course I knew – no self-deception, remember? It still hurt like a bitch to see him risk everything for Little Miss Peace-Preacher. And yeah, that's partly the jealousy talking, I know that too. But nobody sticks themselves in the middle of other people's battles without any protection, not if they're all there anyways. It was crazy enough when we did it, and we had the Gundams. She made a habit out of hurling herself in there with no defence but a rich, entitled attitude. But hey, she’s still alive. I guess if you’re born in the right place with the right name, that actually is enough, huh?

And that was pretty much the end of it. Everything moved so crazy fast from there that the next time I saw Heero was maybe six hours later, we’d just barely saved the Earth, and the war was over.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, I confess, I cheated a bit with the 'canon compliant' part in this chapter. I added to the scene where Duo meets Quatre at the Winner HQ, and canon didn't really leave me space to do that. But I did it anyway. And I'm not sorry!


	5. Chapter 5

The war was over, and it wasn’t even obvious who’d won, if anybody had. We were drifting over the planet in our Gundams. Peacemillion was a shattered wreck.

Quatre shepherded us down to one of those estates of his on earth, near the Maganacs’ lands. A few hours after that, our mechs were all secure in a hangar and we were sitting round a table stuffing down food like we hadn’t seen any in weeks.

When we’d stripped every plate in sight bare, Quatre told us we were all welcome to stay as long as we wanted. 

He was the only one of us with any kind of a life set up outside of the war. I hadn’t thought about anything that didn’t involve Deathscythe since I was twelve.

Wufei was first to answer. “If you’re certain it won’t be an imposition, I’d like to stay here, at least for a while.”

“None of you could ever impose,” Quatre said, looking round at all of us. “Believe me on that.”

Wufei nodded. “Then I thank you for your kind offer.”

Wow. Wufei was actually gonna stick around by choice. Who would’ve guessed?

Trowa made the next call. “I’d like to get Heavyarms repaired if I can, but then I’ll go back out to the colonies.”

I didn’t need a Space Heart to see the disappointment in Quatre. He gave one of those unbearable sweet, sad smiles of his. “I understand,” he said softly, and then his eyes dropped back to his empty plate.

There was never anything real obvious, but I’d kinda figured Trowa might’ve stuck with Quatre. Or maybe I was just projecting what I wanted to see.

I bounced up out of my chair and slapped a hand down on Quatre’s shoulder, leaning in to shove my cheek up next to his. “Well, hey, I’d love to crash here for a bit, why not? Not like I’ve got any plans the next week or two. You can take me out, show me the sights! It’ll be good times!”

Quatre turned his head to look at me, so we were pretty much nose to nose, and that right there was more the smile I wanted to see. “That’s great, Duo. It’ll be wonderful to have you stay.”

And that left Heero, who was studying the wood grain of the table, real thoughtful. All our eyes swivelled his way, and he looked up at Quatre. “Thanks for the invitation,” he said. “It means a lot to know it’s there.”

It wasn’t an answer, but it was the only one we got, and nobody wanted to push right then.

I tracked him down later, when he’d had some time to chew on it. After Quatre had arranged rooms for us all, and some clothes, ‘cos none of us had come back to earth with anything ‘cept what we were wearing and a Gundam. I jogged up behind him in the hallway and threw my arm over his shoulders as we walked, same as I used to all those months back in the schools. 

“Well whaddaya say, Heero? You gonna stick around a while? Sit back and chill out by the pool with me and Quatre?” I poked lightly at the skin over his biceps. “Looks like you need to relax some, you can see the tension in those muscles of yours across the whole length of the room. And damn, but Quatre’s got some crazy big rooms!”

He stopped then and swung around to face me, still close, with my hand laying right alongside his neck. “I haven’t decided what I’ll do yet,” he said quietly. “There’s somebody else I should speak to first.”

Yeah, it wasn’t gonna take me too many guesses to figure out who that was. Ever since he’d thrown himself in with Relena back in Sanc, pretty much every choice he’d made had been all tied up with hers.

I kept my smile plastered on and rolled my eyes. “You’ve always gotta be the smart one,” I teased. “Probably good to take your time. Not like there’s any hurry to do anything now, right?”

He lifted his hand up to my wrist, the pressure of his fingers settling there, staying. “I think… I think maybe there are still some things that need to be done. And they need to be done right.”

Course I knew the way he ran. It’d always been the mission first for Heero. No reason for anything minor like the war ending to change that.

“Yeah, I get it,” I said, ‘cos I did. 

Didn’t mean I was gonna like it. His hand dropped away and he walked off along the hallway to his room, and I stood there leaning against the wall and watched him go.

Heero made a long vid call that afternoon – Quatre told me, I didn’t go snooping through his logs, though I would’ve if he hadn’t said – and then I guess all of Relena’s machinery and influence swung into action, ‘cos he didn’t even stay the night. He packed up those new clothes Quatre gave him and I was there to wave him off with a cheery grin when the car came. “Hey, and don’t forget to keep in touch!”

“I will,” he said, and then the door pulled shut with a thunk. 

I figured most likely he wouldn’t. I just didn’t see him calling me up to make chit-chat about the weather.

Once I knew he was leaving, I was kinda glad he didn't hang around. The end of the war's one hell of a time to discover you're really a coward, huh?

Trowa was only on site a few days longer, and he spent most of them in the hangar, working on Heavyarms. When it was fit for space again, he took off, just like he’d said. 

The three of us who stayed moved our Gundams to a bunker not far from the estate. Quatre owned it, but not officially. It belonged to a subsidiary of a company that was owned by a company – well, you get the picture. It was Quatre's idea that we should keep them out of sight 'til we figured out what we wanted to do with them, and it seemed like a plan to me. I sure wasn't gonna be handing Deathscythe over to the first government jerk who asked.

Earth said it had disarmed, and the colonies said the same, but you’d have to be some kind of idiot to believe it for real. There’ll be weapons tucked away somewhere, ‘just in case’. War teaches you a lot about human nature, and not much of it’s good.

Me and Quatre got along just fine, same as ever. Kicked back and relaxed, invented the craziest fantasies about what we were gonna do with the rest of our lives – terraforming Mars, domes on Titan, that kinda shit. Figured we sure as hell weren't gonna be nobodies! Not that being nobody was ever really an option for Quatre. 

I got more than a bit drunk in the clubs over the border – Duo Maxwell, an ID for any age and occasion - and Quatre nearly fell flat into his carpets, he was laughing so hard at the state I got into. The hangover I had the next day just blew goats. And no, I’ve never gotten up close and personal with an actual goat, but I’m told they smell real bad.

I think I told him about Heero when I was plastered. Quite a lot about Heero, if even half of what I remember through the blur was real. Definitely more than I should’ve.

I never did ask him about Trowa.

Wufei, well, he mostly kept out of our way. Spent a lot of time in some quiet corner of the estate meditating. It was his way of dealing with the killer inside of him – we knew he'd had problems during the war, not least his freak-out before he joined Peacemillion, when he was blowing up pretty much anything that moved. We’d all gotten to wondering at times if there were any good sides left to fight for, but when the answer turned out to be no, firing on every last person in sight was never gonna be the healthy choice.

We worried about him, talked a bit about him, but there was nothing me or Quatre could do to fix it and we kinda made it an unwritten rule not to go on about the depressing stuff too much. After a couple of weeks, Wufei gave his thanks to Quatre, real formal, and he took his Nataku and left. 

Quatre was getting curious by that time and he couldn't resist sticking his nose into the political wranglings that went on. An interim government had put itself together within days; twelve people, equal numbers of colonists and Earthers. Never did figure out just who picked 'em. Relena was one of them, obviously. Quatre knew who the others were – my interest in politics was on the thin side, just so long as none of them were trying to kill me, or sending an army to take over my home.

Us Gundam pilots were pretty much ignored the first few weeks, and then suddenly those government types started falling all over themselves to offer us whatever we wanted. A fast track into any career we liked, any rules bent, age restrictions or criminal records no barrier. It had me puzzled for a couple of days, 'til I finally figured out that somebody had started to wonder just what the hell we might get up to if we got bored or frustrated. I had a damn good laugh over that one, thinking of all those politicians flapping around in a panic 'cos of the missing Gundams. I even wondered if maybe Quatre had given that way of thinking a bit of a nudge, just to make sure we weren't ditched, left broke and homeless.

I turned the Preventers down flat. What the hell does a soldier even do when there isn’t a war on? Drills on parade grounds in fancy uniforms, jumping to attention and snapping, “Yes, sir!”? Doesn’t sound much like me, does it?

Sure, I could’ve trained people, taught them how to pilot suits. But I could do that just as well in other places, without teaching them how to kill people with them. 

And I just wasn't interested in doing any more killing. I'm not gonna lie and say I didn't enjoy some of what we did at the time. We all did, even Quatre, however much he might’ve regretted the need for it later. Nobody can fight if it isn't really in ‘em. You either get it or you get dead or you go nuts. But just because Shinigami liked being good at it doesn't mean I wouldn't rather live without it when I'm given the choice. So I jumped at the offer of a commercial pilot's license and took a job clearing mines from around the colonies.

It got me back into space, where I fitted in better than anywhere else. Earth was never gonna be my place. Got me back into a suit too, doing what I did best, though after Deathscythe it was something of a comedown. But it paid danger money on top of standard, and for me it was a lazy stroll through the meadows when the targets didn’t actively shoot back. Well, if you didn’t know what you were doing, they’d shoot back like a nova, but I knew plenty. After a month or so I’d built up enough cash for a security deposit on my own place so’s I could stop leeching off of Quatre.

I found myself an apartment on one of the newer colonies, well away from L2. None of my plans included dredging through the past; that’s an indulgence for idiots. I moved Deathscythe into a private hangar near the space dock, another one of Quatre’s untraceable hideaways. 

I gave some thought for maybe a week to asking Hilde if she wanted to share a place again – I could’ve gone back to working salvage with her too – but she needed her own life, not mine. The reason I’d fought was so people like her could have their peace and not be dealing with people like me, and it would’ve been real selfish to mess with that.

And I started writing some of this stuff down. In an old-style paper book, with an actual pen and all – seems crazy, huh? But it’s guaranteed secure that way. Nobody’s gonna read any of it ‘til I’m dead, ‘til we’re all of us dead, but who knows when that’s gonna be? If it all goes to hell, and this peace parlay splinters into bitter factions again, I’ve still got my Deathscythe. 

People are always gonna talk about the Gundam pilots, but there’s more to us than all the military shit we blew away and the people we killed. I figure somebody should know that when we’re gone.

And yeah, I gave this thing a pretentious title. You’ll have figured out a long ways back I’m not one for writing a literary masterpiece. Well, I’m not one for thinking up clever and attention-biting headlines either, and don’t they say to steal from the best? It’s a bit heavy on the war and not so much on the peace so far, but there’ll be time for more when I get there, maybe. 

I thought about calling it The Art of War for barely a microsecond, but there’s no art to war. You don’t get to plan it or shape it, you just get to scramble through and hang on with everything you’ve got, including your teeth. Maybe that old dude should’ve called it The Art of Assault, ‘cos you can plan one of those sometimes and have it come off. A whole war, not so much.

The mine-clearing work dried up after a couple of months – there were a lot of ex-soldiers looking for jobs around then, so it got done fast – and I switched to hauling cargo round the colonies. It paid less, but it still covered my rent, and it wasn’t like I had expensive habits. Another reason I’d wanted to drag myself out of Quatre’s orbit before I’d gotten too used to that kinda lifestyle. 

I co-piloted a shuttle with a couple of older crew who’d run supplies in the outer colonies and mostly knew about the war from what they’d seen on the news. Along with just about everybody else, they’d gone for OZ ‘cos they hated the Alliance, but I wasn’t gonna hold that against them. They hadn’t seen the same shit I had. They had no clue who I was, obviously; no-one would ever tag me for that guy from the feeds half a year ago, bruised and bleeding and being hauled semi-conscious along steel hallways by a bunch of OZ thugs.

Along with that commercial pilot’s license, I’d gotten a new ID that said I was eighteen and old enough to fly. That way I just looked like a damn good instinctive pilot, not like a scary freak who’d been secretly paid off by the government. As a useful side-effect, that ID made me old enough to drink too, so I fitted right into the culture of bar-hopping at the end of a run. Thijs and Dayo were good people, and I liked them. Didn’t like lying to them much, but I had a whole other background invented for myself and they swallowed it to a point, and the questions stopped.

I got to keep my name, at least. The only ID OZ ever dragged out of me was the one my blood gave them, and that was a name on a birth certificate, not the one I’d picked for myself. Duo Maxwell had never been flagged by anybody for anything. Well, okay, almost anything. Duo had been flagged just the once – for running out on the rent on that miserable room in the colonies Heero had stuck my name on – but the government types cleaned up the records on that for me too, and I was clear to stay me without stressing over bad credit.

When I had a free day at my apartment, I mostly hung out with a group of guys from a couple of floors down. They were fun to be around, and one of them was good-looking and interested, but… it was the Hilde problem, only worse. Nobody deserved a weird ex-Gundam pilot who was always gonna be lying to them, and no clue what they were really getting into. I’m a killer, sure, a few thousand times over most likely, but I was never cruel.

And before you start thinking too hard, no it wouldn’t have been illegal. Sometime over the last year, I’d turned sixteen, so I was good to go with anybody I wanted. I can’t say I’d noticed my birthday much; it sure as hell hadn’t been important at the time.

A few nights, when my friends were tied up with their own stuff and my apartment was just too goddamn empty, I went out to the bars and had a couple of drinks ‘til I found someone. Only for once, fun and done, and they knew how it was from the start. I’d spent the last year dealing with all kinds of messy and complicated, and I was wanting to keep my life simple for a while.

I did regular maintenance on Deathscythe. Even took him out a couple of times. A lot of standing isn’t good for the mechanisms, and since he had the full stealth capabilities, I figured why the hell not. But he’d been built for war, not pleasure cruises, and it felt strange being out there in a Gundam with no kind of plan for him.

I kept tabs on the other pilots, because… well, you would, wouldn’t you? The few people who know the real you, instead of the lie?

Wufei was easiest to keep track of, and the hardest. He went straight from Quatre's place into some retreat on Earth and stayed put. That was the easy part. The hard part was he refused to answer any communications – mine, Quatre's; he deliberately cut himself off from all of us. One of the old guys in charge was willing to tell me he was still there when I called in to check, but never anything more.

Trowa went back to travelling with the circus. I never did get Trowa's attachment to that gig, other than that adopted sister of his. But then I don't think I ever understood Trowa Barton. He never elevated silence to a religion the way Heero did at the start, but he wasn't exactly chatty and I never got the obbo time in with Trowa like I did with Heero. I’d rely on him in any fight, and I trusted him even when he played himself a traitor, but I know pretty much nothing about him ‘cept how he flies and how he shoots.

A couple of times during the war I came close to digging around. Curiosity can be a real bitch, you know? Trowa would've done some covering, fixed a few records to hide his identity, but maybe he didn't bother to make a complete job of it. Heero knows, if anybody knows; if it's still possible to track down No Name, he'll have done it. No way would Heero Yuy have trusted himself to an unknown quantity if he had the choice. He probably knew everything there was to know about all our pasts a few days after he met us. He was welcome to mine, for all the good it would’ve done him.

I think that's what stopped me, more than anything – knowing it's something Heero would’ve done. It sure as hell wasn't something Trowa would’ve thanked me for. So, yeah, I came close, but I never did it. Damn, but that sounds smug. Hey, a guy's gotta have something to make him feel good about himself, right?

Quatre was happy to stay in touch, obviously. We chatted a fair bit around then, long vid calls whiling away the dull transit hours. It would've been good to spend more time with him in person, but I was always coming and going and Quatre had an entire business to rebuild. It was gonna be a couple more years before he inherited any of what was left legally, but he had a head for that sorta thing and his sisters would’ve been fools not to have listened. Between that and the fingers he kept in the new government’s goings on, he didn't have a whole lot of time for socializing.

Heero stayed with Relena.

Heero’s a guy who needs a Reason. Not just something to pass the time, something to actively work for. Since he was a kid, he’d been handed his reason – to pilot a Gundam and protect the colonies. Then after the colonies turned on us and that was gone, he eventually made Relena his reason – Relena and her Mission For Peace.

And when we couldn't fight, with the colonies under threat, and he was left without any real purpose… well, Trowa let enough slip to Quatre that he pieced it together, and Quatre passed some not-so-oblique comments back to me. So yeah, I knew about their little jaunt round Europe, about Heero tracking down every single relative of that pro-peace general he’d gotten duped into killing at New Edwards; how he offered his apologies, and was down with it if they decided to just shoot him in the head. 

And Trowa helped him do it. Trowa and Heero are a bad combination that way. Too fatalistic by half, and neither of them are up for slapping some sense into each other when they need it.

So Heero stayed with Relena, some kind of bodyguard-cum-friend-cum-who knows what else. I sure as hell didn't wanna know the details, but I was realistic enough to get that it was probably the best thing for Heero. I always knew where he was, at least; could hardly miss it with her face plastered over the feeds just about every damn day. I watched, yeah, and sometimes I caught a glimpse of him in the background. 

And that was all I did. Made me feel less like a psycho stalker if I kept tabs on Relena rather than grubbing for information on Heero directly. Right about then, I was starting to gain some sympathy for Wufei and his monastery gig.

So that's why it was maybe a week before I realized he wasn't with Relena any more. 

I did start searching then. Asked a lot of questions of a whole lot of people who couldn't tell me shit. Dug around inside a few databases I never should’ve been in. Old habits and all that. 

After three weeks or so, I quit. There comes a point when you figure there's more than just bad luck working against you. If Heero Yuy genuinely wanted to disappear, what the hell point was there in trying to find him?

Damn, that sounds kinda like a self-pity trip, huh? But, hey, it wasn't really like that. I had a life, you know. I had a job with a crew I liked, I had cash and a decent place and friends who were just regular people. I chatted with Hilde over the vid links at least twice a week.

So I didn't have it perfect – well, nobody does. I pretty much had it better than I ever had, and I wasn't gonna forget that just 'cos there was nobody around I particularly wanted to fuck.

*****

A couple of months after I moved in, I found myself awake and searching in the way that never stops being a habit. There’s a difference between waking up and being woken up that you get to know real well when your life’s hanging on it.

The room was clear. I didn’t keep anything in there big enough to hide a person.

Knock at the door.

Clock check – just after oh-one-twenty.

I padded through to the hallway, up on my toes to one side while I scanned the camera. 

I guess I wasn’t as surprised as I should’ve been. I mean, who the hell else would be banging on my door in the night and not even bother to call first?

When I opened up, he just stood there, watching me, bag over his shoulder.

His hair had gotten longer, hanging all the way past his nose in thick, tangled clumps. And he was pale. Big dark circles over his cheekbones and skin pulled tight all along his jawline. He looked like he did back on Peacemillion, when the waves of dolls just kept on coming, and none of us could figure out who we were even supposed to fight. 

He didn’t bother to say hi, and it didn’t feel much like the time for light-hearted chit-chat on my part either, so I just stepped back and gave him space to come on in. “Guess you’ll be wanting a bed, huh?”

He squinted in the light of my hallway, staring at me a few seconds through his eyelashes. “If I can.”

I’d seen him do a lot of shit, and I’d never known him be less than a hundred percent sure about any of it. 

There’s a second bedroom in my place, and he looked like he needed maybe a week of sleep, so that’s where I showed him.

*****

I woke up the next morning and _there was somebody in my apartment_ and there was a gun in my hand before I remembered he was supposed to be.

He was poking around in the kitchen. He was being quiet about it, considerate really, but he didn’t know where anything was. My cupboards weren’t stealth cupboards, and he was having to look through a few of them to find things.

I’d figured he’d sleep ‘til noon, but you can always rely on Heero not to do what you might think.

I only pulled on a T-shirt over my underwear. Not like there was any part of me he didn’t already know about, though I’d picked up a few new scars here and there. OZ never did leave me any butterfly strips after they kicked me.

He was most of the way through gathering up coffee supplies, and I pulled out the teaspoons to go with it.

“Sleep okay?” I asked. There was a hell of a lot more I wanted to know, but it seemed the safe place to start.

“Yeah.” Heero was gonna say that either way, but he did look better. He still needed a shower, and maybe a shave (though honestly, the stubble kinda worked for him), and to fix some shit with his hair, but he looked like a guy who’d just dragged his ass out of bed and less like a ghost.

“You have bad taste in coffee,” he said, frowning at the packet, but he spooned it into the machine anyways.

“Well, sure, I’m an L2 brat,” I said, flashing a grin. “Not likely I’d be drinking the same stuff as Relena’s people, huh?”

Yeah, I dropped her name to see what reaction I’d get. Course I did. 

Funny thing was, there wasn’t even a flicker. “I suppose not.” It was just an answer, somewhere on the lighter side of neutral.

“Eggs good?” I looked past all the spaces in my fridge, hoping that’d be a yes, ‘cos I didn’t have a whole lot else on offer. 

“Scrambled?”

“No problem.” I knew I had some cheese to toss in there, a few dried herbs, and maybe I had an onion somewhere around that was still alive? “Catch!” I threw the cheese at him over my shoulder. “Grater’s in the top of the cupboard by the oven.”

And then we were making breakfast like it was just something we did. My kitchen’s not so big – didn’t need to be for one – and we were working round each other, beating eggs and slicing onions and throwing it all in together to cook.

The eggs turned out okay. Wouldn’t be winning any prizes on the reality shows, but Heero would’ve eaten a lot worse when he was on Earth, camped out with a group of rebels on the squashy end of a war. 

“You should try putting tarragon in your eggs,” he said after a few mouthfuls. “It works well.” 

So, he’d probably eaten better too, while he was hanging round with Relena and her type. “Well, if you’re just gonna complain, you’re cooking next time!” He might’ve been right, but he wasn’t likely to find any tarragon in my kitchen. I jabbed my fork in the air over the table between us. “You don’t like my coffee, you don’t like my eggs, maybe you’ll let me know if you find anything you _do_ like.”

His face was tipped towards his plate, and he angled his eyes up at me through his hair. “I suppose the company could be worse.”

And there was that flat, tenuous humour I’d gotten so familiar with back at the start of last year. After the way he showed up, I counted it a big plus to know it was still there, and I snorted at him. “Definitely a come-down in class from Relena, not much point denying that!” I looked round the not-so-vast confines of my apartment, all open plan but for the bedrooms. “I’m guessing they put her up in hotel suites bigger than my whole place, huh?”

“Relena they do, yeah,” he said. “The rest of her staff, not so much.”

So he hadn’t been staying in Relena’s rooms then? Or could be they’d given him his own just for appearance; stuff like that actually seems important to some of those people.

I could convince myself of anything if I tried, and it wasn’t like any of it mattered, ‘cos he wasn’t with her now. “Probably no bad thing, less of a hit when you head back into the real world with the rest of us. It was one hell of a switch for me when I moved in here, after Quatre put me up for so long, with meals and everything all laid on!”

I didn’t ask him where else he’d been, why he’d washed up at my door like a ship on the reefs. He’d either tell me or he wouldn’t, and neither of us did well being pushed any place we didn’t wanna go.

Having him there in my space, eating together and me chattering away about nothing, it was like the past was sitting there at the table with us. That’s a crazy dumb thing to say, right? But it could’ve been any morning in any one of those schools, with both of us shoveling down eggs. 

It was a year ago now, only we’d been one hell of a lot more than a year younger. Flitting from target to target, acting like we could take down Earth’s whole military complex, one chunk at a time, just the two of us. We were unbelievable fucking idiots. But I still didn’t see how we could have done anything different unless we’d given up and crawled on home from the start, and that was never gonna be us.

It couldn’t have been so long as a year ago. I remembered every detail of how it was to have him hard in my mouth, to have him thick and heavy on my tongue, his muscles tightening under my hands. That part – that part could’ve been last night, the way it was stuck so fast in my head. Watching him eat, watching his lips open round his fork, watching his throat when he swallowed, it was bringing everything back as sharp as Deathscythe’s screens…

And then my eggs were gone, and I couldn’t keep delaying any longer. “I gotta get to work soon.” I had a transport run scheduled – local within L3, luckily, not a job where I’d be gone for days. “You’re welcome to stick around, if you want.”

He looked up from his plate, blinking at me through all that mess of hair. “Thanks.” Just the one quiet word, but he said it like he meant it, and it clicked with me again how much he’d changed by the war’s end. Time was, an offer like that would’ve gotten me a non-committal grunt and some guess-work left to do.

I doubted he’d go anywhere for a while ‘cept back to bed, but we’d both spent enough time in a cell that being stuck in any kind of space without an easy way in and out wasn’t so great.

“You’ll be needing a key then.” I pulled the spare out of a drawer – the apartment came with two as default – and tossed it in an arc across the room. He plucked it outta the air left-handed and casual, still balancing the coffee in his right. I could’ve done it too, same as breathing, but maybe I’d gotten too used to being around people who didn’t.

He set the key down on the table, next to his plate. “How long will you be gone?”

“Most of the day. Unless we get hit with a random check, I’ll be back around eight.” Spot inspections were annoying, but they were a part of the job. Apparently they were there to make sure nobody was moving illegal weapons. Funny, huh?

“Okay.”

“Gonna grab a shower quick before I go. Sorry, you’ll have to wait your turn!”

“That’s fair,” he said. “It’s your place.”

It still seemed weird hearing that. I’d never had anything in my life that was mine, apart from Deathscythe. And technically it still wasn’t my place, ‘cos I didn’t own it – I wasn’t so dumb as to buy anything when I had no clue where my life was gonna end up – but I had a long lease, and while I paid the rent and didn’t trash the place, nobody could kick me out of it. I guess it was as much mine as anything was gonna get.

I was already running behind, so I stripped and showered fast – no time to jerk off or think too much either – and I rushed out with my hair dripping a trail down my back.

“See you later, Heero,” I called out airily, and pulled the door shut after me.

I’ve got no kind of god taking up space in my head, but I was still praying.


	6. Chapter 6

I took the monorail to the spacedock most mornings, but that day I fired up the bike. It was about the same amount of time with traffic, but riding gave me something to do that wasn’t just sitting around with a head full of thoughts.

Thijs and Dayo were there ahead of me. They didn’t mind me being late this once. Not like I made a habit of it.

The three of us ran through the pre-flight checks and went over the manifests and cargo to make sure they matched up. Everything looked good, like always. I wouldn’t have stayed with a company that ran sloppy – anything I’m gonna fly had better get maintenance on schedule.

The delivery deadline was tight, and the direct route took us through one of the debris fields left over from the war. Skirting round it would be the safe way, but we’d likely lose the time payment. 

The roster had me slated as co-pilot for this run, but we all knew I’d be flying. Dayo was a decent pilot, but she liked empty space around her, and none of us wanted to miss out on the extra cash.

I took the ship out of dock and hit a fast cruise ‘til we met up with the war’s leftovers.

There’s debris scattered everywhere in those sectors, and none of it’s in stable orbit. You can’t map any of that stuff, it’s different every time you fly it. The instruments pick up the big pieces at range, but a lot of that shit’s too small to trip an alarm ‘til you’re right on it, so it’s visuals all the way. You’ve gotta pick your route through all that spiraling junk and it’s pretty trick flying, ‘specially when you’ve gotta do it at speed if you wanna hit the deadline. 

Most days it was my idea of a fun run, getting to really fly instead of just setting a course. That day, it was enough to keep my brain fully engaged, at least – it made for a good distraction from everything else I was trying not to think about too much. Weave and twist, roll between those three pieces of engine closing in from different attitudes, jink to port round the wrecked frame of one of those old mobile dolls. 

Once we were through and back in clear space, I handed the controls over to Dayo to take us the rest of the way. Then I went into the nav logs and tweaked a few of the coordinates, made it look like we’d stayed out closer to the edges. The bosses didn’t like us flying right through the worst of it, something about hassles with the insurance, but nobody gives the numbers more than a quick once over unless there’s reason to do it, and I wouldn’t be giving anybody any reasons.

Normally I’d have been able to take it easy from there, sit back ‘til we were coming in to dock, but no way it was gonna happen that trip.

Thijs kicked off the inevitable. “So, Duo, what was holding you up this morning? You have someone at your place last night, huh?”

“Not like you’re thinking! I had a friend stop over, that’s all.” It was true, so far as it went. “Had to feed him before I left, couldn’t just grab a coffee and run out the door, could I?”

“A friend from home?” Now it was Dayo’s turn to get nosey. They’d stopped asking about home a while back when they didn’t get too much in the way of answers.

“A guy I used to fly with.” Keep it true and keep it light, always the best way to spin a story.

“In pilot training?” Her voice had gone kinda spiky round the edges. 

“Yeah.” It was one of those white lies I didn’t much like telling, but they weren’t dumb. They knew something was up with me. Even with that age-boosted ID of mine, I shouldn’t have been fighting in last year’s wars, but OZ had been pretty desperate for cannon fodder for a while there, and more than a few kids had lied and signed up underage. 

“He as good as you?” Dayo sounded genuinely curious on that one.

I leaned back in my flight seat and folded my hands behind my head. “Course not,” I said, with a grin. “But he’s as close as anybody’s likely to get!”

“How long’s he going to be around for?” Thijs asked. “We’ll need to know, if you’re planning on being late every time.”

I kicked at his foot, the only bit of him I could reach. “Once! I’m late once and you’re never gonna let me live it down!”

“We might give you a pass this time if you behave in future.” Dayo had a great fake scolding mom tone, made her sound like Sister Helen on a tear.

“Yeah, yeah, I’ll be good, I swear!”

“And don’t think you’re getting away with dodging the question either. Spill, kid!”

“I dunno how long he’s staying,” I shrugged. “Dunno if he knows either, for sure. I get the feeling it was a last minute thing, his dropping by – just looking to kill some time and, ‘I know, haven’t seen Duo in a while!’”

“Does he work in L3 somewhere?” Thijs had dropped the tease and was back in full-on nosey mode.

“He had a job not so long ago,” I said. “Don’t think it fitted him too well.” Not the way he’d looked when he showed up last night, for sure.

Their eyes went up over me to each other then, and I wondered just what line of sob story they were building up for Heero in their heads. The war had gotten everywhere, and even for people who didn’t fight, there were a few hundred sob stories out there to pick from. 

“You’re a good friend, Duo, if he knows he can just turn up like that,” Dayo had gone all Sister Helen on me again, but in the nicest way.

“Yeah, yeah, real bleeding heart, that’s me all right.” That was more Quatre’s thing than mine. Heero should’ve turned up at his door if he was looking for a hug, but hugs weren’t really Heero’s thing either.

They left me in peace after that while Dayo docked the ship, and we saw the cargo unloaded, then refueled and picked up our load for the return trip. There was no deadline on this one, so we took the boring route while Dayo put her flight hours in.

And I got to sit there and try real hard not to be over-twitchy.

Most days I’d have pulled a cap down over my face and taken a nap through the dull part of the flight – one useful skill you pick up from a war is grabbing sleep whenever you can – but no way it was gonna happen with me wired so tight. Sitting around doing nothing much was never my thing, but that run… I swear I’d had shorter days in a cell.

Was he even gonna be there when I got back? I didn’t know why he’d shown up like that, so how was I s’posed to guess what he’d do next?

He’d taken my key though. If he was just gonna leave, why would he bother? But if he changed his mind, maybe I’d get back and the key would still be sitting on my table…

He’d asked when I’d be back. That would only matter if he planned on being there. Unless he needed to know how much time he had to play with before he should get out…

I had my brain running in circles like one of those hamster critters in a wheel. A wheel that had missed the maintenance schedule and squeaked on every rotation.

I might’ve been shifting around in my flight seat, pushing with my toes and rocking back and forth just a little bit. I might’ve been clutching at the arm of my chair hard enough my fingers started to ache.

He had to be planning to stay, else why bother showing up at all? If all he wanted was a place to crash overnight, he could’ve gone to any hotel. Or maybe he couldn’t? 

But no… that was one thing I was dead sure of. He’d shown up like so much wreckage, but if he thought any part of his trouble was gonna be washing up at my door, he’d have told me _that_ in the first five seconds.

If I’m honest, I was a lousy co-pilot the whole of that run, even the parts where I really should’ve been paying attention. But Dayo was reliable, and if anything had come up, I’d have been on speed inside a microsecond. That’s another thing a war teaches you, to flip a switch and turn it on at full, ‘cos you do it or you die. 

I saw enough to notice Thijs and Dayo looking at me then looking at each other, but they didn’t say anything, and I didn’t wanna kick off another round of questions, so I kept it shut too.

Dayo finally got the ship into dock back home, and we swung into the usual routine – check on the cargo unload, make sure it all got accounted for and signed off as being in one piece. They were still watching me through the whole thing, and soon as we were done, Thijs said, “Go on, get out of here, go catch up with your friend. We can file the paperwork.”

There was a bit more than the logs left to do; we still had to go over the final inspection on the transport, make sure she was set for tomorrow. “You sure?”

“More than sure! You’ve been antsing around the whole trip, I’m getting all wound up just watching you!”

“Thanks, guys, I’ll return the favour some time, okay?” Normally we’d all go for a drink and eats after a run, but that time they didn’t mention it.

“Shoo, kid!”

“All right, all right, I’m gone!” I swung around and sprinted for the parking. 

“And call us if you need anything, okay?” Dayo yelled after me. “Either of you!”

Like I said, they were good people. It was almost sweet and totally ridiculous, how they felt they should look out for me. They hadn’t any clue just how good I was at taking care of all kinds of shit for myself.

I jumped on the bike and kicked it into life, the engine revving eager and hungry beneath me. I tucked myself down low and let her go, making the most of the clear run out of the dock before I hit city streets and all the traffic.

I wanted to tear through the colony and get the hell home; I wanted to be there already, I wanted to _know_ , but I stopped off at the store before I got back. Picked up some take-out from the deli and a few other bits to feed us into the next day. Another ten or fifteen minutes wasn’t gonna change what I found. If he was there, I didn’t wanna be left struggling for an inventive way to feed him eggs again, and if he wasn’t…

Well, worst case was I’d have something in for tomorrow too.

*****

There’s a feeling to an empty space, one with nothing living inside it. I knew it the second I cracked open the door, that it wasn’t like that, _he was still here_ , and I yelled out, “Hey, Heero, I brought food!” ‘cos he might’ve been asleep again, and I wouldn’t wanna live through a war then get shot by a friend.

He wasn’t sleeping, but he was sliding a hand out from behind my sofa cushion. My crew had cut me loose and I was back before I’d said.

I dumped the bag down on the kitchen countertop. “Get your ass in here an’ grab us some bowls, will ya?” I called out behind me. I shoved the take-out in to reheat some, and started unpacking the rest of it.

He appeared by the cupboard next to me, doing that silent creep thing he’d always been so good at. He’d taken that shower and combed out his hair. It still hung down way past his nose, and he brushed it off to the side as he leaned down. “How was the run?”

“Easy. Got the speed bonus,” I said with a grin.

“You ever miss one?”

I flicked the end of my hair at him. “Not likely! How ‘bout you put some coffee on when you’re done with that?” I’d have popped open a beer if it was just me, but I figured to steer clear of booze with Heero.

He must’ve been investigating during the day, ‘cos he knew where everything was now, fishing out forks and mugs as well as the bowls. “Will you be away again tomorrow?”

“Nah, got the day off. If you’re still gonna be around, guess you’ll be stuck with me.”

“I’ll be here.” We were shuffling around each other, side by side in the limited space, and his arm was brushing up against mine while he set things out and I put stuff away. 

It had been like that in the morning, with the onion and the eggs, but it was easier to ignore then, when I was on running on a timer for work, and we’d always put this thing aside when there was something else we needed to do. But now there wasn’t and that was when we’d – 

The oven beeped and I grabbed the gloves and pulled out the tub, splitting the ramen between the bowls. 

Heero had gone to work on the coffee machine, so I took the cutlery and the mugs over to the table and put everything out, along with the cream from the fridge. And then I went to grab my bowl to take it to the table and so did he. He was right there, close, with so much hot skin, and I could shut my eyes and it was like we were still in those schools and I could reach out and we were gonna….

He’d stopped, staring down into the ramen. He had his hands on the bowl, but he didn’t make a move to pick it up. “Does it get boring?”

It took me a second to get my head around what he… oh.

I’d never thought about it that way. I had a job, I did it, I paid the rent. That’s how a normal life’s s’posed to go, so they tell me. It wasn’t like I’d ever met normal.

But mine wasn’t the same as any other job. It let me be _me._

I looked over at him and I shrugged. “I’m a pilot, I fly. Not ‘cos the world’s fucked up and people get screwed if I don’t. I fly ‘cos I like it.”

The coffee machine burbles died back, settling into that soft final hiss, and Heero hummed one of those noises that meant something vaguely like agreement and turned away to grab the pot. 

And then we were both moving again, carrying stuff over to the table, flopping into our chairs and shoveling ramen. I’d munched on a couple of snacks during the day, but lunch hadn’t been a thing and I was definitely good to eat.

“Relena’s job is… difficult,” he said. “The same people go to twelve different meetings, and when they end, nothing’s changed.”

“Sounds about right.” If I’d been dripping any more acid, I’d have curdled the cream. The colonies spent fifteen years trying to negotiate with the Alliance before we built Gundams instead. “Talk, talk, talk, and when they find a place they can all meet in the middle, it’s maybe three millimetres from where they started out.” 

Heero was big on getting shit done, not so big on compromise. We all were, else we’d never have been put in a Gundam. 

“I wasn’t helping her,” he said quietly. “I didn’t know how. I might have been getting in her way.”

That figured. Heero wasn’t so good at locking his frustrations down and smiling sweetly past them either. It must’ve been like a whole second job for Relena, wrangling Heero between all those stuck-up politicos.

“She’s spent most of her life being taught how to deal with all that stuff. I’d be pretty fucking clueless, but there’s a long list of things you could probably say that about, huh?” Me and him, we’d been trained for just one thing, and how to play the diplomat wasn’t any part of it. “So, where’d you go from there?” It was what I’d been wanting to know all day, but I’d needed him to show willing to talk.

“I realized I’d be more use to the Preventers.”

My fork rattled against the edge of the bowl, a ringing in my ears like the after-shock of a bomb. “You signed up?”

He shook his head. “No. I offered to help.”

I shoved another forkful of ramen into my mouth; chewing gave my face something to do to keep from freezing like I’d been tossed out an airlock. “Noin?”

“Yeah.”

Noin had started as Alliance, then OZ, and she might’ve switched sides later, but I don’t think too much else about her changed. From what Quatre said, she’d been the one running dark ops in Sanc, building the secret weapons hoard while Relena preached disarmament to the world. 

And she was one of the first on board with the Preventers, a key part of setting the whole thing up. I didn’t need to be a genius to figure that whatever use she’d found for Heero’s skills probably didn’t make it into Relena’s official briefings.

The rest of us had caught some slack here and there during the war – me, Quatre and Trowa for sure, we all got our downtimes, even if we didn’t ask for it, and Wufei was off radar for months at a time. Heero was the one who never stopped. He fought OZ damn near that entire fucking year, and when he wasn’t fighting OZ, he was fighting something inside of himself, or fighting Zero, fighting anything so’s he wouldn’t have to stop and _look_. And when the war ended, there were still people who wouldn’t let him stop.

Me, I’d gone along with the hope we could maybe keep some kind of peace, but there were a few faces I would’ve cheerfully smushed into my kitchen tiles right then.

I stabbed my fork into one of the eggs floating around in my soup. “You leave that offer open?”

“Maybe,” he said. “Situational.”

Maybe wasn’t so bad. Maybe left me some wiggle room to get inside and poke at. 

“You know, Quatre’s keeping pretty tight tabs on what goes on,” I said. “Somebody’s gotta do it for sure, and it’s not gonna be me dragging my eyes over a thousand government documents, trying to chew through what any of it actually means.” I waved my egg-and-fork combo back and forth between us. “I figure he’ll be quick enough to let us know if there’s anything needs doing that’s gonna need us to do it.” Quatre had always been the natural strategist among us, and Heero knew it. That’s why he told Quatre to take charge when he took off for the Libra.

Heero poked around in his ramen, watching what swirled to the surface. “Yeah, I guess he would.” He chased down a chunk of bamboo shoot and scooped it up. “You talk to Quatre often?”

“Course I do! Quatre’s a fun guy when you can get him to put down the paperwork. We call each other up every week or so, chat about his plans to fix up the colonies, get everything up and running again, but better, you know?” There was a lot of shit out there to fix. The colonies had plenty of issues going back long before the war, but that was one of the reasons we’d wanted rid of the Alliance. “Hey, we should get you online with Quatre later. You’ve been on the inside track, you’ve gotta have some ideas he can use.”

“I’d like that.” He looked up from his bowl and locked his eyes onto mine, that laser-tight Heero intensity. “I’ve not been as good about keeping in touch as I should.”

“You were busy, I get it.” I hadn’t been put out that he didn’t, I’d figured as much. I knew how he always went all-in, full focus on one thing, so I hadn’t tried either. But it was kinda nice that he’d say that now.

“What about the others?”

“I talked to Trowa a few times, but he’s a hard guy to pin down. The circus is always moving, and half the time I call he’s up on the high wire or hanging out in the lion cage or something.” Mostly when I talked to Trowa, it was about Quatre’s stuff anyways. Me and him didn’t have a whole lot in common, ‘cept for the obvious.

“And Wufei?”

“He’s doing his Wufei thing. Living the quiet life somewhere in the mountains.”

“I think that always suited him better than anything.” Heero tipped his head, watching me as he spooned up more of his soup. “Tell me more about what Quatre’s doing.”

So that’s how we spent the rest of dinner, talking about Quatre’s hopes for social reforms while we were slurping down ramen. Quatre had no official role in any of it, but he knew Relena from his time in Sanc, and he at least half-way knew the six representatives from the colony side, who’d all been a part of his dad’s social circle. Quatre and his sisters had plenty of influence to lean on there and no qualms about using it.

Heero knew about some of it from the time he spent with Relena, the bits that had gotten on to the agenda for those endless meetings he bitched about, but there was a hell of a lot more that hadn’t even made it that far. And Heero knew some of the arguments against it, the nuts-and-bolts reasons it was all going nowhere, not just the ones the spokespeople gave as excuses.

Yeah, I really needed to shove Heero in a room with Quatre, for so many reasons. Heero made for a lousy diplomat, but he picked up on every miniscule detail around him and he could definitely call bullshit when he saw it happening in front of him.

Then the bowls were empty and the mugs were empty, and I grabbed my stuff from the table to stack it in the washer. Heero gathered up his own and followed me into the kitchen.

“If you wanted, I could get you a transport job,” I said. “Casual, long term, whatever.” Okay, that wasn’t coming out the way I meant it. I didn’t want it to sound like… “Not that you need money. I mean...” Fuck, I was screwing this up bad. “I mean, _I_ don’t need money. The rent’s covered, and if you stay for a bit, it’s all good. But if you wanted cash for something. Anything. You know…” And then I shut the fuck up before I could dig myself a hole down through fourteen floors of apartment block and all the way out into space.

He'd stopped by the cupboards while I blathered my piece, and he stared at me a few seconds longer before he answered. “Thanks. I might… I’ll think about it.”

I figured that was as good a middle ground as I was gonna get, between making him out to be a charity case and sounding like I was hitting him up for board and lodging. Should’ve just kept my damn mouth shut.

He came over to the washer and we loaded in the rest of our stuff; and when he straightened up, he took that one extra step so there was no space left, and he reached out, and then his fingers were curling round my forearm. 

He’d grown a few centimetres the last year. I grew too, obviously, but he beat me out there, and I was looking up at him now, just enough and close enough that I couldn’t help but notice the change.

A pause, one of those instants when time doesn’t just hang, it tingles all across your skin.

“Duo, are you still – ”

“Yeah.” Enthusiastically gay, into Heero specifically, however he was gonna end that, my answer was the same, always had been.

And then he was on me, or I was on him, and we had our hands all over each other, and our mouths all over each other, and I’d been thinking about this for such a crazy long time and it was all going so fast I didn’t get the chance to think at all. 

We didn’t make it out of the kitchen. We barely got our clothes open. We were down on the floor and our cocks were right there and we twisted around so we were sucking on each other like we’d been sixty-nine-ing only last week.

I came almost embarrassingly quick. Heero lasted a bit longer – more tired, more stressed, it’s gotta have some effect on a guy – but he wasn’t that slow. And I had the taste of him thick and heavy in my mouth for the first time in a year. 

I remembered it used to be I wasn’t sure I liked it much. Guess I’d changed my mind. 

I was half-sprawled on my kitchen floor, staring down between us into his eyes with my nose maybe five centimetres from his groin, and I said the only thing I could think of. “You want dessert?”

He lifted his eyebrows all the way up behind that damp straggle of hair, and he said, “I thought we just had it,” deadpan right the way through.

He made a sex joke. In my kitchen. It wasn’t even that funny, and I burst out laughing anyways, because Heero made a fucking sex joke in my fucking kitchen. I flopped over the rest of the way onto my back and I howled, and then he was laughing too, and we both lay there on the tiles and cackled like loons.

*****

We ate the ice cream.

Espresso ice cream. Like I said, I’d thought maybe he’d be gone. 

We sat side by side on my sofa and ate it straight from the tub. I left him to take the end where he’d stashed that pistol away, though he’d seen me notice and he would’ve trusted me with it just as well. I watched his lips close up around his spoon, watched his tongue slide out and lick away the last of it as it melted.

We were close, ‘cos of sharing the ice cream, our elbows knocking together and our forearms brushing as we scooped it up. 

“How did you decide?”

I blinked and stared, my empty spoon hovering half way to the tub. “Decide what?”

“What to do. What you wanted.” He waved his hand about, sweeping vaguely over the room. “This…”

I dug myself out another chunk of ice cream before he ate the rest of it. “Not sure I ever decided, really. I knew what I didn’t wanna do, so I did what was left.”

“So what didn’t you want to do?”

I licked at my spoon, let the cold espresso seep over my tongue while I tried to figure out how to explain. “A year ago, I was gonna save the colonies. G told me to go to Earth, said I was the only one who could do it – me, all by myself. Then it turned out there were five of us to save the colonies, and five was one hell of a lot better than it just being me, you know?” I’d learned real early in life that being on your own never led to anything good, and the war only slammed it in harder. “Now there’s hundreds of people who say they’re gonna save the colonies, save Earth, save everything, and I think they should take their shot, ‘cos I was never as good at it as I thought I was gonna be.” I jabbed my spoon into the tub again, hitting up against the cardboard at the bottom. Okay, maybe I’d been eating more than my share. “I mean, we fought so’s the colonies could be independent, and whatever we’ve got now, it’s not that.”

I dunno what he’d been expecting, but I was a shitty place for him to come looking for answers. I only barely had my own, and I sure as hell didn’t have any of his. If this was one-size-fits-all, I’d be swinging trapeze at the circus with Trowa. Nope, I wasn’t seeing that either.

He was giving me this oddly contemplative and questioning kind of a look, and I narrowed my eyes to glare at him. “Don’t go thinking any bullshit on me, I’ll do it again in a second if I have to.” I wasn’t keeping Deathscythe in a hangar as some weirdly out-sized souvenir. “But if I don’t have to, then I won’t.”

“It’s that easy?” He was watching me, all earnest and genuinely curious.

How the hell would I know, really? I’d been figuring it all out by the week. “Has been so far,” I shrugged.

“Hmmm.” It was one of his more thoughtful non-committal noises, and he went back to scraping up ice cream before I finished off the lot. From there it was a straight race to the bottom, and we swept that tub clean. 

We carried it all back to the kitchen and we made another pot of coffee, and this time yesterday I hadn’t known where he was or even if he was alive, and now he was just doing stuff in my kitchen like it was normal. And weirdly it felt like it was, or could be, but nothing about either of us was anything close to normal, and watching him fetching cream from my fridge was such a casual thing and some bizarre illusion, both of them running at once. 

We took our mugs back to the sofa, and he sat the same place as before with the weaponry and…

And I stopped.

Last time, I’d just flopped down right alongside him, ‘cos we were gonna be sharing the ice cream. Now I was holding a coffee and I had to sit all slow and deliberate, and I was standing there wondering…

I sat not so far from where I’d been. Left a gap of five centimetres, so I wasn’t clinging on him like a flight suit. Close enough so’s he could shift and touch if he wanted. 

We drank coffee and I put that call through to Quatre. No hassles with time zones in the colonies, the light’s all artificial anyways, so everybody everywhere runs on the same clock. Later in the evenings was always the best chance to reach him; it was the only time people seemed to stop hunting him down with paperwork. 

Quatre was almost as glad to see Heero back and okay as I was, and the three of us chatted our way through more than an hour, playing catch up. Heero talked about the shit-stirrers in Relena’s team of advisors; he said nothing about the Preventers or Noin. Me and Quatre always had each other laughing while we yapped, and Heero laughed some with us too before we ended the call and blanked the screen.

He never did shift and touch. The five centimetres stayed. 

No big surprise. Yeah, we’d blown each other in the kitchen, but we used to do that every night, and it wasn’t any kinda thing. It had been a fun way to get ourselves off, that’s all.

I took the mugs away and I set the washer going and put away the coffee packet, and then I was all out of things to do. “Well, night Heero!” I called. “And don’t forget you’re in charge of breakfast tomorrow, I’m expecting to be impressed!”

He was still in his spot on the sofa, looking up at me through too much hair. “Night, Duo.”

I was walking to my room, and I wanted so much and I didn’t wanna make it seem like him staying at my place was conditional on anything, ‘cos it wasn’t.

I stopped in the doorway with my hand gripping the plastic of the frame. “You can sleep in either room,” I said. “Whichever you want.”

I was still a coward when it came to Heero, ‘cos I didn’t look back; I just stepped inside and pulled the door half way closed after me. And I hadn’t turned the lights on, and I didn’t even move, and I was standing frozen in the filtered glow from the other room when I heard those so-quiet footsteps behind me. 

He slept in mine. For the bits of sleep we actually got.


	7. Epilogue

Guess it’s been a while since I last got back to this, huh? I’ve been busy, and kinda distracted, and I’m not finding so much time on my own to just sit and chew on my thoughts.

It's been a few months now and he's still here.

He took me up on the transport work a couple of weeks in – all casual, he’s not on any contract. But the company can always use a pilot who can fly anything anywhere, and when someone’s sick or just wants some time off, Heero’s a great guy for them to call on.

Mostly we fly separate. I already had my crew, and Heero wasn’t looking for a permanent roster. That means there’s some weeks, if we’re both on longer runs, we don’t see each other much. But sometimes he fills for Dayo or Thijs, and those weeks everything works out great.

Dayo and Thijs kinda like him, funnily enough. Heero’s definitely not what they expected from me – they would’ve been thinking someone a bit bubblier and lower on the intensity scale – but they know talent when they see it, and they appreciate his work ethic. And they tell me I’m less of an ass to them when Heero’s around for me to poke at instead, but I reckon I’m more than capable of being an ass to everybody, all at once.

The guys downstairs – well, Heero’s not so much their thing. They were real keen to meet him the first couple of times, then nearly as keen not to after that. I guess I don’t see as much of ‘em as I used to, but we still go out for drinks when Heero’s gone for a couple of days.

Heero talks to Quatre regularly, and Quatre talks to the government types. So long as they both tell me nobody’s showing signs of turning megalomaniac, they don’t need help from me on that front.

Sometimes me and Heero peddle a bit of influence of our own and we take Quatre’s ships out for testing after a rebuild. And then we go a ways beyond the requirements and _fly._ Hey, if you didn’t test a repair right up to the limits, you didn’t test it at all. Sometimes it’s the two of us on board a shuttle or a transport, and sometimes we take a single pilot each, and then we’re practically racing, weaving and dodging and jinking all round behind each other. Those days are pretty fantastic days.

My lease said I couldn’t have a guest stay more than a month, and when it was up, Heero’s name went on the tenant’s agreement. 

It’s a legal nicety, that’s all, and neither of us have many qualms about going the other side of the law when we choose. I know that, course I do. It still had my heart thumping close to mach ten when he signed. 

We talk about the nothing stuff, like you do when you share a place – the groceries, the plumbing, the car’s dodgy fuel intake valve. Yeah, we have a car now. The bike’s not so practical for two people and their gear.

We don’t talk about the elephants that trapeze between the light fittings. 

He’s there when my friends’ work schedules don’t match up with mine and just sitting alone in my apartment staring at a screen might’ve driven me crazy. Those nights most likely I would’ve hit the bars just to be around people, and gotten myself either laid or hammered. But he’s there and I don’t. 

Even when he’s not there, enough of him is.

Sometimes I think about how I still don’t know his name. I mean, he’s Heero to me, never gonna be anything else, and that’s the name on his new ID, so I guess that’s who he is now. But before the war, he would’ve been somebody else. And then I start wondering what was so bad about being who he was that staying Heero seemed like the better choice. 

I don’t know what his Reason is now. I watch him, kinda roundabout and careful – I wouldn’t wanna be hovering over him like some fucked up ghost of his mom – but I don’t catch any of that worrisome shit when he gets too much and too long in his own head. Kinda the opposite.

He talks a lot more now than when I met him. Says something ridiculous a few times every day just to get a rise out of me. He laughs too, and not that cracked and creepy battle laugh. I know that one well enough; we both had it. He laughs now ‘cos sometimes things are actually funny, and he makes me laugh when he does.

It’s good that he lightened up, definitely good for him, but it wouldn’t have mattered to me if he didn’t. 

He cooks some days when he’s not working. And I mean like really cooks, not just heating something out of a jar. Hard to imagine, I know, Heero Yuy, Gundam pilot extraordinaire and saviour of the Earth all coated in flour (and I might help out by dusting around a bit more flour than there needs to be, just ‘cos he looks so funny that way), but he’s good at it too. That shouldn’t be a surprise; he always was ridiculously good at anything he decided to do. 

There are times when one of us isn’t having such a great day, and I think most anybody else would’ve run for the hills. We know when to leave enough space, and not too much; I don't think a civvy would ever have clued up on that, and I’m not sure they’d want to.

He’s there in the night when I need someone; when I need touch, and when all the air’s being sucked outta the cell inside my head.

Funny how your brain fixates on some things, huh? All that stuff we did in the war, and I’m just fine with it. OZ interrogating me and beating the shit out of me while I yelled at them to go fuck themselves, seems I’m okay with that too. But sitting in a cell with my lungs heaving, trying to suck in air without enough oxygen left in it – that one’s stayed with me. Wufei just lay there and fucking meditated through it, but there was nothing the first bit calm about me, then or now.

Heero has his own bad nights sometimes. I don’t know what it is that’s stuck with him, but he gets it, and I get it, and we make it okay. And sometimes he sleeps in the other room, but mostly he comes to mine. Guess it might seem kinda weird, but it works, for us.

Shit. Who the hell am I trying to kid? No self-deception, I said that, didn’t I?

It's not enough; it can’t be enough. It’s maybe only half of what I want.

I want to kiss him sometimes. And I'm not talking about fucking his mouth with my tongue. I've done that, in the night, when my cock's screaming for him and our lips are pressed together as hard as our bodies and it's all about the sweat and the need and the release; and it's one hell of a hot thing. But sometimes I wonder how it would be to kiss him over breakfast. I want to press my nose into the hair at the back of his neck just ‘cos he’s there. 

He might figure this arrangement we’ve got is good for the duration, but I dunno how much longer I can keep it going before I screw up. Before he gets hit in the face with something he's been explaining away as just touchy-feely Duo and his endless lack of respect for personal space. And maybe he'll be gone so fast I won't see him for dust. ‘Cept this is Heero Yuy we're talking about and there won't be a whole lot of dust kicked up behind him either.

I go off on the longer cargo runs, and when I’m done, I make my way back to the apartment with this twisted thing creeping around deep in my gut; if he’s not home, the first thing I do, every time, is check to see if his stuff’s still there.

But, hey, one thing I know is you take what you can while you can get it and right now, I've got a hell of a lot more than I thought I would. I'll keep on taking for as long as he stays. And when he streaks off across the system again, when he finds himself some vital mission nobody else is gonna do, I'll deal, just like I always do. 

I've got a life of my own, and good friends, and if Heero moves on, they'll still be around. And I'll still have my job and a place to sleep and people who like me for me, which I figure is what most people in this world make do with. 

And I’ll be just fine.

We all will. 

We always are, right?

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So that's finally finished, after a seventeen year gestation. Better late than never, I guess! Thanks to everyone who stuck with me to the end :-)
> 
> If you enjoyed this fic enough that you want to spread the love, there's [a tumblr post here that you can reblog.](https://tiggymalvern.tumblr.com/post/639129515278434304/new-year-new-fic-or-maybe-its-more-of-an-old) [Or one on Pillowfort here.](https://www.pillowfort.social/posts/1996209)


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